Chilean Chronicles, Part 66: Carlo Gutierrez and the Fight for Public Emails

As part of my work as a Fulbright scholar here in Santiago I’m looking at the impact of the landmark 2009 Transparency Law on investigative reporting.

I’ve written before about how the focus of my research has changed after I arrived here and found that my initial plan of doing a pre-and post-law analysis of content in the country’s leading news outlet was fundamentally flawed.

Instead, I’m taking the pulse of a range of folks who have been involved with the law.

Carlo Gutierrez, who heads the legal team of the municipality of Melipilla, is one of them.

We met briefly last week during our meeting with Melipilla Mayor Mario Gebauer.

Gutierrez was the point person for the municipality’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to gain access to emails that contained communication about how to distribute reconstruction funds after the devastating earthquake of February 2010.

I took the bus again to Melipilla, made my way to the city hall, and was directed to the back of a series of single-story buildings.

After asking three people for directions, I found Gutierrez’s modest office.

His name is printed on the wooden door. Neatly organized piles of paper sit like rows of cards in a solitaire game.

Gutierrez, who has a boyish face and longish black hair, arrived a couple of minutes after I did.

He had prepared a folder of material relative to the precedent-setting case he had filed and that led him eventually to present for the first time in his life before the country’s Supreme Court.

For Gutierrez, who had previously worked in the Interior Department, the initial request as well as the subsequent legal arguments, seemed straightforward.

The Transparency Law gives citizens the right to information by and about their public officials.

Digital communication like emails that are written from official accounts are covered by the law.

The subsecretary of the Interior, then, had a responsibility to supply the information he had requested on behalf of the community.

It didn’t go that simply.

Gutierrez explained that the agency answered neither the first nor the second request he sent.

When they eventually did answer, they refused to provide the information, citing privacy concerns of the public officials.

This struck Gutierrez as strange because they explicitly had asked for information from public officials written on public accounts about public business.

The community then appealed to the Transparency Council established by the law. It accepted the municipality’s argument and said that it had a right to the emails it had requested.

This time the government appealed to the regional court in Santiago. It’s the middle of three levels within the Chilean court system.

Gutierrez offered an oral argument before the court.

Again, he felt the issue at hand from a legal perspective was straightforward.

But the court of three judges found otherwise.

It held in favor of the defendants, accepting the argument that emails written by public officials on public accounts are not subject to the law.

On to the Supreme Court, the highest in the land.

Gutierrez again went and presented his oral argument. A lawyer for the Transparency Council joined him.

As opposed to the United States, where lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court have exactly 30 minutes and can be peppered at any minute by any of the nine justices, in Chile the lawyers have about an hour, Gutierrez said.

Also in contrast with the United States, where the questions the judges ask often can reveal the justice’s orientation in a case, Gutierrez explained that the lawyers only received a few questions, none of which sparked a meaningful exchange.

Earlier this year the court rendered its decision.

It held in favor of the defendants.

The decision was a bitter disappointment to Gutierrez, who felt that it was made for political reasons.

The court has reiterated its stance in ensuing cases filed by non-profit organizations like Ciudadano Inteligente. But what is perhaps of even graver concern is that Secretary General Cristian Larroulet is seeking to codify in law the restrictions that the court has placed through the cases on which it has ruled.

In Chile, legislation originates from the executive branch, then goes to the Congress and Senate for discussion and a vote before returning to the president to be signed.

As Secretary General, Larroulet has President Sebastian Pinera's ear and is doing his bidding. (Pinera already showed his anti-access position in 2011 when he sought to have members of the Transparency Council removed because of their support for releasing emails.)

Gutierrez holds some hope on the new government that he hopes would propose legislation that goes in a more, rather than less, open direction.

But he also is strongly concerned that the courts’ actions have struck a strong blow against the nation’s still fragile democracy.

Chile has been an authoritarian country in the past, Gutierrez said. A key tool in the transition to democracy is the access to information.

They have closed the window on that, he said, a trace of sadness crossing his face.

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 64: Los 80 Helps Chile Confront Its Past

There are many ways to confront a nation’s painful past. With official dates of remembrances and honoring those who have died.

With statues and other types of memorials, like the one erected in honor of assassinated Chilean Senator Jaime Guzman that Dunreith and I passed Sunday during our walk through the neighborhood of Las Condes.

Or with weighty tomes produced by prominent writers like Nobel Prize winning-author Gunter Grass’ who penned A Broad Field, a novel about German reunification.

These methods each have their merits, and there are others that arguably have a more widespread impact.

Like Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin, a film about the waning days of the Communist era. The movie, which rapidly attained cult status in Germany, uses humor from start to finish as it evokes the nostalgia many East Germans felt for certain aspects of life under the regime.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5hzmwGW4Ac&w=560&h=315]

Here in Chile, Andres Wood takes the nation back to the dark days of the Pinochet dictatorship through the lense of a single family in the series, “Los 80,” or “The 80s.”

Dunreith and I just finished watching the first season-she’s shifted to make the show, rather than the original version of “Ugly Betty”, one of her major Spanish-language learning tools-and it’s riveting stuff.

Wood was born in 1965, and came of age during this turbulent era. His effort to represent the period with meticulous fidelity is one of the show’s central commitments. Actual footage from television shows like the omnipresent Mario Kreutzberger, better known as Don Francisco, appear in every episode. So, too, does music from the period like “Eres,” which also appeared in Sebastian Lelio’s whimsical movie, “Gloria.” The radio program, the expressions, the method of dress, and, I am sure, many other elements to which I am not attuned, place the viewer in 1982 as the show opens, and then moves through the decade in subsequent seasons.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s3BIX0duKs&w=420&h=315]

Wood trains his camera on the Herreras, a middle-class family consisting of the happily married Juan and Ana, their teenage children Claudia and Martin, and their younger boy Felix. At the beginning of the first season, life is humming along in a comfortable and predictable rhythm.

Juan is a respected worker at the factory where he’s been employed for many years. Ana tends the home with loving care. Claudia and Martin are studying to pursue their dreams of attending medical and aviation school, respectively. Everyone dotes on Felix.

After receiving a promotion and the higher salary that goes with it, Juan stretches and buys a color television, much to the delight of the other family members. But then he’s laid off along with all of the other workers during the recession that hit the nation extraordinarily hard.

Part of the skill and appeal of Wood’s show is the way he shows the impact of larger social forces and events on the family-dear friend and wise soul Ava Kadishson Schieber has talked before about always knowing that she was a pawn in the chessboard of life-without being too heavy-handed.

Juan’s inability to provide for his family prompts Ana to seek work of her own-a decision that provokes fierce resistance from her unemployed husband. Wood depicts Juan’s shame and helplessness at being unable to fulfill what he sees as his male responsibilities without announcing, “I’m looking at gender attitudes, people.”

One of the season’s more touching moments comes when Juan starts crying while talking to his father-in-law, who during his visit for Fiestas Patrias is insisting on having meat that Juan cannot afford.

There are many such instances during the show. They work because of the deep love that the family members feel for each other, even as the peaceful veneer they have managed to maintain is being ripped asunder by the events that are starting to overtake the nation. Juan’s insistence that “We don’t talk about money or politics” at the dinner table becomes harder to sustain as Martin joins the Air Force and Claudia finds herself drawn into politics at the University of Chile.

This attitude, as Miguel Huerta, Matias Torre, and Macarena Rodriguez discussed on Friday night, is at once a coping mechanism, a means to not confront the extent of the brutality that was occurring and a response to an environment in which you could be taken away for no reason, at any time.

In one of the season’s darker episodes, Juan experiences this terror when he speaks up for a more politically active co-worker who is being beaten relentlessly by police officers while Juan is forced to sit in the back seat of the police car.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkMsPXzdzUo&w=560&h=315]

At the same time, Wood also succeeds in creating a feeling of community that permeates the show. Everyone shops at the local store run by a fervent Pincohetista who nevertheless displays concern for Ana when Claudia is detained after a protest. Martin’s fumbling first courtship, Felix’s hesitation to dance the cueca and failure to convert a penalty, and Claudia’s conversations with her mother about sex all are part of family life that occur in countries across the planet.

This interspersing of the ordinary concerns of family life with the increasingly ruptured tranquility in which they have been living gives the show additional potency. We care about the characters because we can relate to them, even as we understand the ways in which their lives are slowly, but steadily, being upended.

This is not to say that “Los 80” is without blemishes.

The issues in the episodes occasionally resolve too neatly in a single hour. (Items introduced in the beginning of an episode nearly always factor in at the end.) Several of the key characters are one-dimensional, and thus veer close at times to appearing like vehicles for Wood’s clear anti-dictatorship perspective or his storytelling objectives.

These are but small points, though, in a potent, provocative and stimulating series that we’ll continue to watch with enthusiasm.

Chileans have been doing the same.

Dunreith reported that her bringing up the show during the English conversation class we are teaching at UDP’s American Corner sparked a lively and vigorous debate about life during the dictatorship. Conversations like these reached unprecedented levels this month, which contained the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

We’ll start Season Two tomorrow.

The healing throughout the country is ongoing.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 63: Rafael Gumucio's Book Launch

Now that's what I call a book launch.

The event was held in the basement of the Gabriela Mistral Center, or GAM. Named for one of Chile's two Nobel Prize-winning poets, the center was opened during the tenure of Salvador Allende, and was the place where the ruling junta went after the Pinochet coup. The center was renamed the Diego Portales Building during the dictatorship, but resumed its art-oriented focus after Pinochet's reign ended.

As opposed to similar events in the United States, where the author is introduced, speaks, reads a few sections of the book and answers some questions, author, UDP neighbor and friend Rafael Gumucio didn't speak until an hour into the event, and ultimately did not read a single word from A Personal History of Chile, his latest work.

This was because he only spoke after Carlos Pena, the rector of our university and one of Chile's top newspaper columnists, had read his remarks in which he discussed Rafael's weaving of fantastic pairings of important figures in Chilean history as similar to legendary Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges' "Ficciones."

Rafael began to speak after eminent historian Gabriel Salazar, a long-haired, white-haired bearded man with a deep voice who speaks in paragraphs, not sentences, had discussed at length a 1998 United Nations human development report that spoke about the contrast between Chile's economic success and "malestar interior," or internal discomfort.

Salazar talked about the directions and reversals within the book, of his use of the Hegelian method of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and of how, for Rafael, former President Ricardo Lagos was similar to Napoleon for Hegel.

Rafael offered his own comments after former student, humorist and writer Fabrizio Copano offered his assessment of the book as having a core of sadness yet also being an optimistic work.

He spoke after being invited into the conversation by broadcast journalist and longtime friend Consuelo Saavedra. Consuelo had said that they had known each other for about 20 years, and somehow the conversation always returned to him. But she added that the book helped her understand why he has always steered the discussion that way.

When he spoke, Rafael, who has wild black hair, a full beard that is flecked with grey near his chin and was wearing a blue jacket with a dark sweater, unleashed a torrent of words, ideas and jokes.

I don't know Rafael real well and I have not yet read the book.

Our offices in the journalism department at the University of Diego Portales stand around the corner from each other.

I sat in on a panel he moderated about the role and limits of humor in Chilean society-he's the head of the Institute of Humor Studies at UDP-and we both attended a lunch for author and futurist Nicco Mele that Alejandra Matus organized.

I did know that he had been exiled to France during the dictatorship.

But even these comparatively meager interactions were enough to help me understand that he combines the frenetic energy and wit of Robin Williams with the humor of Roberto Benigni.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIWB-Neyj-c&w=420&h=315]

As Rafael riffed about his pairing of epic Chilean figures like Pinochet and television host Don Francisco, about how he had thought Lagos would govern compared with what he actually did and about how Michelle Bachelet would like to be anti-colonial, but is in fact colonial, I turned around and looked at the room, which was filled with close to 100 people in seats and standing against the back wall.

They were listening and, in many cases, they were smiling a pleased, even indulgent, smile.

So, too, was Rafael's father, whose name Rafael bears.

The elder Gumucio was sitting, along with his wife, daughter-in-law and other family members, in a section of chairs to his son's right.

As he spoke, Rafael's younger daughter, a binky in her mouth and pigtails on her head, moved back and forth from her grandfather to her father's lap.

She stayed just long enough to crawl up, get a hug and then return to her grandfather.

Back and forth she went, sometimes crawling when her father was speaking, at other times when he was listening to the other panelists.

The conversation dipped and turned, ebbed and flowed back and forth among the panelists and the author and moderator, moving deep into the nature of history and social movements and the country's real and imagined past.

Consuelo was just asking Rafael one of many questions she still had when the word came that the time for the program had ended.

No one had left.

We all repaired to the area outside the room, where Rafael signed books and talked with people as the rest of us dolloped corn kernels onto sopaipillas, picked up and munched on eggplants on crunchy bread, and, of course, drank some red wine.

After a while, I hugged and congratulated Rafael before walking out into the cool night to head onto the Metro and back to Dunreith.

As I walked, I realized anew that Chile is a still wounded country engaged in healing from the damage caused by the the physical pain and enforced silence of the dictatorship.

Humor is an important part of that process.

I thought about the gift that Rafael has given of of embracing and moving into the intersection of personal history with public experience, and of launching the book in the very building where those most responsible for that damage first announced their seizure of power.

And, once more, I appreciated my great fortune to be in Chile at this moment in its history, and to be a witness to an event where university presidents and scholars and humorists and friends and family can sit and talk and listen and laugh in a way that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago.

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.