Chilean Chronicles, Part 81: Bursting With Birthday Gratitude

October 21, 2013 jeffkellylowenstein3

Wow.

That’s about all I can say after a birthday in which I felt more appreciated, more loved, and more alive than ever before.

It started from the moment I woke up and continued throughout the morning, afternoon and evening.

It was a day of marriage.

As she always does, Dunreith took extra care to make the day special from beginning to end, orienting what we did around what I wanted to do and making sure in many different ways that I understand and feel her end of how much we mean to each other.

It was a day of travel and family.

We purchased tickets to head to the north with Aidan on the first of what will ultimately be three trips in the country and toward the fable Incan ruins of Machu Picchu.

It was a day of data and teaching.

I met with a pair of panicked students and talked them through the map they need to submit as part of their mid-term project, and later taught four of my colleagues the steps involved in preparing for, and then carrying out, a map.

Shortly before midnight, a dozen students passed in their mid-term projects. I’ve not yet read them all, and I can feel their increasing mastery of, and confidence in, their newly acquired data skills.

It was a day of projects.

I spoke on the phone with Maura Brescia, a long-time Chilean journalist and author of a provocative new books that asserts that Socialist President Salvador Allende did not commit suicide with a gun Fidel Castro gave him, as has been commonly asserted, but was killed by forces loyal to Gen. Augusto Pinochet during the coup on September 11, 1973.

We met her last night in one of about two dozen tan tents, each of which was inhabited by a publishing house at a spring book festival in nearby Parque Balmaceda. An elderly torture survivor wearing a dark beret was telling his tale of abuse during the Pinochet era to an older crowd.

Dunreith directed my attention to the book, which friend and scholar Hugo Rojas had told us about at his house.

We chatted for a while.

I told Ms. Brescia, who has different colored eyes and fiery red hair, about my project on the Transparency Law and our conversation with Hugo, and she expressed a desire to meet with us.

Today, we made that plan.

It was a day of food and drink.

Dunreith purchased a pair of fresh rolls, I had my weekly mocha frappuccino, and we went together to Peru Gustoso for a trio of ceviche.

When Dunreith informed the waiter it was my birthday, he brought another stiff Pisco Sour Peruanismo to go with the one we had already ordered.

I felt it.

It was a day of family.

Members of both sides of our family called and sang and left video messages and wrote and expressed their love.

It was a day of friendship.

I heard from folks stretching back to the very beginning of my life, and moving forward through just about every major experience since then, stretching all the way to the friends we have made here in Chile.

Friends from all parts of my life and many places and countries.

England.

Albania.

South Africa.

Germany.

Chicago.

Brookline.

It was a day of memory.

At different points during the day images danced through my head of being allowed up to Paul Tamburello’s classroom to get my football in 1974, of having a ping-pong tournament in seventh grade, and of being carded in California the day I turned 21 years old.

As I read the birthday wishes, other memories surfaced of experiences shared with the people who wrote, of playing basketball or going to Sunday School or teaching on Thompson Island or playing tennis in England or watching our boys play lacrosse or singing in Orvieto, Italy.

It was a day of language.

I taught and spoke and joked and asked and answered and mispronounced in Spanish.

It was a day of writing, one of the things I love to do most in life.

It was day of exercise, of walking hand-in-hand with Dunreith before and after our meal. (The post-dinner pace was a bit slower, due to our being a tad woozy.)

It was a day of dreams and possibilities, of being reminded yet again that it is possible to build a life that is based on the past, lived in the present and with an eye toward the future.

“it’s funny …” my brother Jon wrote this afternoon on Skype. “most of our limits are mostly self-imposed

by what we can think of”

More and more, I’m understanding that these are not just words and that Jon is right.

With each step back and forward, with each strand of mutually remembered and valued past woven into the fabric of our lives, I feel more and more able to live out of dreams and values.

I feel more and more that it is possible to work toward the visions we have, to make them real, and to do so in concert with other people so that together we leave something behind for those who come after us.

I don’t know where this will all lead or go.

But I do know that at this moment, because of all that I received and those who gave to me, I am bursting with gratitude, joy and love.

Thank you.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 80: Meeting Juan Guzman

October 20, 2013 jeffkellylowenstein3

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

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

Instead he spoke with one of his daughters.

And he talked with his wife Ines Watine.

It was 2004.

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

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

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

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

He felt compassion for Pinochet.

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

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

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

She asked him two critical questions.

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

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

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

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

Guzman’s conflict receded.

He knew what he had to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He couldn’t hear anything else his superior said.

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

But it doesn’t show everything.

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

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

But he did worry about his family.

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

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

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

Not even for a single day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said I’d be willing to listen.

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

We all laughed.

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

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

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

But now I have.

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

The light had not descended from the sky.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 79: Fulfilling The Road

October 19, 2013 jeffkellylowenstein3

It's been four days since I returned from Brazil, and life has started to resume its (for now) normal rhythm here in Santiago. I've worked with students and colleagues at the University of Diego Portales, had lunch at my favorite place near campus-you can get a tasty and filling meal of chicken and mashed potatoes for just $4-and taught our final English class to the adult learners at UDP's American Corner.

After Dunreith arrived back from Brasilia last night, we resumed our ritual of watching Los 80, Andres Wood's show that takes us through a pivotal decade in Chile's family through the eyes of the Herrera family.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vFVu9Sbdl8&w=560&h=315]

But the ripples of the conference remain, whether starting to explore the website mastery of the remarkable Gianinna Segnini or passing out the business cards I collected to my students and having them read out the countries of the new colleagues and friends I met.

One of them was a young female investigative reporter from Iraq.

She's slight, with long, straight, black hair and is just a few years older than the fourth-year students I have the honor to teach.

We met outside the Royal Tulip hotel where we were both staying and took a cab to the campus where the conference was held.

I'm not going to share her name because she doesn't use it when she reports.

She uses a pseudonym instead.

Her byline has no picture above it.

She gives no interviews.

And, while some of her immediate family know what she does, many others think that she works in a bank.

This reporter takes these measures to protect herself.

Because of the nature of what she writes-her most recent project is an expose of corruption in Iraq-she could be killed if her identity were to be revealed.

She told me this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if she were talking about the type of computer she uses or where her office is located.

She spoke without hesitation, fear or any plan of stopping doing what she loves.

On Tuesday I told my Chilean students about this brave young woman and her work.

On Wednesday, I wrote to her, along with all of the other folks I met at the Rio conference.

In the note, I shared with her that the young journalists in my class now know about her because of what I told them.

Today, she answered.

She thanked me for my email and then wrote a simple, but breathtakingly profound, statement:

People who appreciate our work are the ones who help us to fulfill the road

Think for a minute about the interrelationship she suggests between the author and the audience, the writer and the reader.

Think about the community she implies of journalists dedicated to digging up and sharing the truth with people about what is happening in their countries.

Think about the road she invokes and its direction toward a more open, informed and peaceful world.

Consider her idea that being appreciated does not mean that others do the work for us.

But it does help.

She went on to tell me that her most recent project will be published in Arabic and English if she can find an outlet before thanking me again for my note.

The gratitude is mine.

I'll continue to move forward with projects here and planning with Dunreith what we will do when we return to Chicago.

But as I do, I'll also think at moments of the wisdom of my courageous young Iraqi colleague, who continues to expose the truth of what is happening in her homeland, all the while being strengthened by those who acknowledge and encourage what she does.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 78: Leandro Drives Us Around Rio

October 17, 2013 jeffkellylowenstein3

Leandro Weissmann pulled into the driveway of the Royal Tulip hotel one minute after 2:00 p.m. on Monday afternoon, and instantly apologized in a deep, gravelly voice for arriving late.

At the recommendation of IRE friends Mark Horvit and Jaimi Dowdell, we had contracted the sturdily-built, grey-haired son of an Austrian father and mother with Turkish roots to drive us around Rio.

We didn’t realize that the spectacular view of the city from atop Sugarloaf was just one of the pleasures of riding with Leandro.

Dunreith was in the front.

New York Times reporter, former Duke Professor, Pulitzer Prizer winner and friend Sarah Cohen in the back.

A steady stream of commentary issued forth from Leandro as he battled traffic and his own temptation to use foul language as he took us past the adjacent neighborhoods of Ipanema and Copacabana-he pointed out this the Barry Manilow tune took place in Cuba, not Brazil-on our way to Sugarloaf Mountain.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOT1lWFB0og&w=420&h=315]

Leandro spoke a fluent, if heavily accented, English-a product, he told us later, of having studied at an English-language school during his childhood.

Although I was disappointed to miss a day of the glorious stew of humanity at the conference, I certainly did not want either to leave Rio having seen nothing but the hotel and university when conference was being held or to have missed the chance to spend some relaxed time with Dunreith in the city that will be the center of the world’s attention twice in the next three years.

Dunreith and I had already taken a long, leisurely stroll along the slightly slanted sand as the water from the waves grew closer and more forceful. A white surfboard stretched across his head, a portly man who resembled author Jon Lee Anderson walked in the opposite direction. Fathers and sons kicked a soccer ball to each other before jogging past us, passing the ball between them. Women of all sizes wore the famed Brazilian bikinis. As the cool water tickled our feet, we talked about all that we had seen and heard at the conference the first few days and about where we might go in the next months and years.

For his part, Leandro covered all manner of subjects.

Staunchly pro-military, he told us how unhappy he was with the current state of Brazilian society.

We had it much less bad than Chile and Argentina, he declared. The only thing you couldn’t do was say bad things about the president.

We didn’t touch that one.

Leandro moved onto soccer, showing us a picture of him with a smiling a Pele and the yellow Brazilian jersey the man many consider to be the greatest soccer player ever had autographed for him.

This lead into a discussion of Pele’s merits as compared with Argentine legend Diego Armando Maradona.

Leando was unimpressed.

How many goals did Maradona score? he scoffed. Three hundred. Pele scored 1,000 more. Shut up.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NriH61defQI&w=560&h=315]

Leandro certainly did not heed his own advice, but rather launched into a series of three Argentinian jokes, the two most memorable of which went as follows:

Question: How does an Argentine commit suicide?

Answer: By jumping from the top of his ego.

An Argentine boy told his father, “Dad, when I grow up I want to be just like you.”

“Why is that?”

“Because then I’ll have a son just like me.”

Ouch.

Back to politics.

Leandro never liked former president and Brazilian icon Lula, and was particularly disdainful of current president Dilma Rousseff, whom he labeled a former bank robber.

Asking him about the impending Teacher’s Day and their ongoing strike elicited a sigh.

They are forgetting about one thing, he said. The students.

Leandro’s mood did improve when he talked about his wife’s recent shift on the political spectrum from the left wing to a more conservative position.

In part to reward her for this movement, he said he planned to take her to Machu Picchu later this year.

By this point we had arrived at Sugarloaf. Leandro explained that his friend who usually parked the car was not available, so instructed us to head up to the top.

The lines looked impossibly long, but putting down $25 per got us to a pair of cable cars that carried us quickly to the summit.

The view was breathtaking.

Clear, untroubled water lapped up against an impressively green city with idyllic beaches.

Leandro joined us shortly after we reached the top. He identified the city’s different neighborhoods, again pointing out where the military had made a positive difference.

Time was moving, and we needed to hustle to catch the free bus that would take us from the conference to the National Theater, where a dancing performance, tribute to pioneering editor Marcos Sa Correa and awards ceremony were to be held.

On the way down, Leandro showed me a picture on his telephone of his first granddaughter who is just six months old.

His smile nearly split his face.

He looked much less happy when he discerned from the second tram that his car was being ticketed.

When the cable car stopped, Leandro hustled ahead. He was told, but did not seem entirely convinced, that he had not been given one.

Back along Copacabana and Ipanema, wading through traffic, avoiding being sideswiped along the way.

On the way back Leandro told us about his father's company and pointed out beachfront site where his parents had lived. The company made chassies for buses. His dad earned a fortune, but then took on partners who Leandro said were good at stealing.

He tried to warn his father, but he didn’t listen.

The company went bankrupt in 1982.

After shedding the partners, his father built the business back up.

The government seized it in 1986, Leandro told us, a mournful sadness filling his voice.

His father told him before his death that he had been right, but the acknowledgment was little consolation.

Leandro’s mood lifted before we pulled back into the Royal Tulip’s driveway, paid him and thanked him for his time.

It hadn’t been an afternoon at the investigative conference, to be sure.

And, somehow, Leandro’s tour had plugged a hole that I had wanted to fill.

We zipped up to our room, changed our clothes and rushed back down to catch a taxi.

The evening awaited.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 77: Viva La Mundial

October 16, 2013 jeffkellylowenstein3

In the three months that we’ve been in Chile, we’ve seen events drenched in emotion. We’ve seen the agonizing pain of surviving loved ones holding up large black and white photos of their sons, husbands, uncles, daughters, and nieces who were disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship in the 70s and have never returned.

We’ve seen the exuberance of Chileans drinking terremotos and eating anticuchos for days as they celebrated El Dieciocho on September 18, the national Day of Independence.

But perhaps the greatest show of feeling came last night, when the country’s national soccer team punched its ticket to go to Brazil next year for the World Cup, the planet’s largest sporting event.

The unifying power of sport has been commented on before.

In Invictus, the film based on John Carlin’s book, Clint Eastwood shows how Nelson Mandela donned the once-hated green jersey of the Springboks rugby team to bring the nation together in its quest to win the Rugby World Cup the year after the first free and democratic elections. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZY8c_a_dlQ&w=560&h=315]

In 1967, the great Pele literally caused a 48-hour ceasefire in secessionist Biafra so that both sides could watch him play.

Here in Chile, the country remains deeply divided about the legacy of the Pinochet era, but there there was no apparent division within the nation last night.

The cancellation by non-profit Inria-Chile of their previously planned Data Tuesday was the first sign of the game’s significance.

The second came in Papi Pollo, a rotisserie chicken joint near our apartment that I go to regularly. Amidst the heat and grease of the french fries, sopaipillas and whole chickens that a man in white shirts and pants cut with impressive dexterity, the other worker, a stocky man with black hair and a round, open face, told me that he was giving all his attention to the evening’s game.

He was concentrating so hard that he gave me an extra 1,000 pesos for the half chicken I was taking back to our apartment.

You can give me this if you want, I said, but the charge is 3,500 pesos, not 2,500.

It’s important to focus on the game, but you have to focus on money, too. We laughed and shook hands after I gave him all the money.

First stop

I left our building and went out in the warm, clear evening air shortly before the game started.

I walked up Providencia Avenue, stopping at the newspaper stand that also sells candy and portraits of iconic music stars like Elvis that are hung on a fence on the other side of the sidewalk. About a dozen people had formed a half circle around the color television that had been carefully placed atop a stand so that all could see.

Most were sitting, and a few were standing.

I bought a coke to help establish my legitimacy and started snapping pictures.

The first 25 minutes of the game were generally in favor of Chile, whose players were wearing red shirts and who were playing in front of 67,000 fans at Estadio Nacional, the national stadium. They were issuing full-throated roars from the moment the referee blew the whistle to start the match, which Chile only needed to tie to advance to La Mundial.

Things were quieter at the kiosk, where the group watched intently, grimacing when Ecuador threatened and holding their hands up when Chile threatened, but did not score.

But they didn’t stay that way after a header by Alexis Sanchez zipped past the Ecuadorean goalkeeper and into the back of the net for a 1-0 lead. Sanchez ripped off his shirt in ecstasy.

The crowd gathered around the television didn’t do that, but erupted in joy, yelling, screaming, jumping up and down and punching their fists in the air.

I continued to take pictures until one of the celebrants came over and told me in English with the utmost seriousness: Enough.

Enough with the pictures, he said. You can stay here and watch the game with us, but stop taking pictures.

So I left.

Paseo Orrego Luca

I walked further up the street, crossing over to the other side and stopping at Paseo Orrego Luca.

It’s an outdoor drinking establishment enclosed on three sides by buildings and filled with tables that sat comfortably under large, tan umbrellas and beneath the light provided by yellow, red, green and orange lanterns.

Adapting a page from South Africa’s hosting of the World Cup in 2010, the owner of the place, which was doing a very brisk business in french fries and beer delivered by bustling waiters, set up at least a dozen televisions of varying sizes so that everyone could easily see the action.

The crowd, many of whom were wearing red shirts and a number of whom sported jester hats with the national colors, also exploded in jubilation just as I was pulling up, when Gary Medel deposited the ball from a Sanchez header into the net for a 2-0 lead.