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"To open old wounds, bringing once again debates
that have been long forgotten, serves no purpose whatsoever!"
-- Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. (London 11/12/98),
From a public letter written in his hospital/jail.
"There is no way of judging the future but by the past."
-- From a Chinese Fortune Cookie, 1998.
The news this time came via the Internet. A long-time
friend and journalist sent me an e-mail saying, three days before it actually
happened, that Pinochet might be detained in London. He informed me that
the long time Spanish effort was about to bear fruit. Of course, I did not
believe him; it was publicly known that the ex-dictator had traveled freely
to England on other occasions, without ever missing the opportunity to drink
five o'clock tea with his dear friend Margaret Thatcher. I was also surprised,
because, a few days before I had read the main article in the New Yorker
and he had seemed so untouchable. In the large color photograph, he looked
so good and immaculate, almost father-like, ready to retire with all his
honors, undisturbed. It seemed almost like science fiction to even think
that the former dictator and self-appointed senator for life, Augusto Pinochet
Ugarte, who had walked above the mortals since the day he bombed the Moneda
Palace and established himself as the owner of Chilean society, could ever
be in danger.
What made it more unbelievable was the common history of both countries.
England, I thought, should be the perfect place for him to be safe. His
subordinates had used British-made Hawker Hunter planes to bomb the government
palace that Tuesday morning of September 11, 1973. Furthermore, the Chilean
navy had been buying war materiel from England ever since Chilean Independence
in 1818. And it was the English who had trained the Chilean navy, which
was instrumental in the taking of a large piece of territory from Perú
and resulted in land-locking Bolivia. Chile grew almost forty percent in
the War of the Pacific in 1879. Expansionism has been a mutual narrative
of both governments. Also, Pinochet's record with post-colonial Britain
was impeccable. He had been the only Latin American "head of state"
that had lent full support to the English Armada for the retaking of their
colonial possessions in the Southern seas: Las Malvinas (Falkland Islands).
"Impossible!!" I replied. "You must be dreaming, your memory
is not working right, or have you forgotten what the General owes to the
English elite!?"
"No nos olvidemos," ("Let us not forget") is
a phrase that has become very familiar in Chile once Pinochet's arrest was
confirmed. The whole event has unleashed a landslide of remembering, and
many Chileans who have been silent are now digging into their traumatic
pasts. For a great majority of Chileans, the whole Pinochet affair is ultimately
about the ethics and the politics of remembering. By default, the "Londonazo"
is articulating the possibility of looking at the past in ways that were
never possible before. Somehow the neatly designed strategy for imposing
silence and forgetting in Chile had been shattered in the middle of the
night in an exclusive clinic in London, thanks to Spanish lawyer Baltasar
Garzón.
Let us not forget...
The genesis of the problem started the very first day that the dictatorship
began to rule the country with an iron hand in 1973. The systematic persecution
of political opponents, their assassination, expulsion or disappearance
was widely denounced by the international media throughout the years of
the regime. The gruesome dictatorial behavior cost Pinochet's reign of terror
a long period of international isolation and condemnation by the international
community of nations.
It was during this time that the regime set in motion the hegemonic strategies
for covering and silencing their murky past. First, the criminals gave themselves
amnesty in 1978 by a dictatorial decree, making it almost impossible to
bring to justice those who had committed "excesses of power,"
a euphemism used by their lawyers to describe their brutal behavior. "Amnesty"
became the special safe conduct for those who had committed crimes against
humanity in the days when the ghosts of Mengele and Klaus Barbie roamed
the land hand in hand with the secret services that the dictator had created.
According to a recently disclosed CIA report written in the early eighties,
more than five thousand secret agents were part of the infamous DINA (National
Defense Directorate). Last week, a Chilean newspaper said that there were
more men in Pinochet's secret police DINA than in the Gestapo.
Furthermore, the new Constitution of 1980, written by the right-wing-lawmakers
and Pinochet's cronies, assured the military that they would retreat to
the barracks in peace and with full honors. In this fashion, the laws they
had put in place during their reign of terror now protected the criminals
for life, or so they thought.
After 1986, it was clear that the dictatorship was on its way out. International
opinion, especially in Washington, agreed that dictatorships were not the
best governments for the new scenario of rapid globalization. Thus, new
strategies of silence needed to be laid out, in order to assure a smooth
transition to democracy in Chile. The negotiations for the new democratic
transition took place behind closed doors and the military, the right wing
parties, and some sectors of the opposition agreed that La Memoria de
Sangre (Memory of Blood) problematized the pact. Therefore, the troubled
past was to be once again covered, this time under the rubric of "Truth
and Reconciliation." Questions of justice were erased form the new
equation.
The Retting Report: Justice and Amnesia
In 1988, the dictator was voted out in the first free election in the country
since 1973. Shortly thereafter Patricio Aylwin, the new Christian Democratic
president who had been a major political foe of Allende's and who was in
charge of formally declaring the Allende administration unconstitutional
in 1973, created the Rettig Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in 1990.
The Commission was to piece together what had happened with the executed
and the Desaparecidos (disappeared). This was a strategy to deal
with the Memory of Blood that the regime had created. The list of crimes
is controversial and macabre: at least five thousand executed, two thousand
Desaparecidos, more than a hundred and fifty thousand exiled. Not
including the thousands and thousands who were imprisoned and tortured,
as entire stadiums became detention and torture centers in the beginning
of the regime. All of these figures are contested because there has never
been the possibility to officially record them.
The Rettig Commission produced a two-volume report which established that
the Pinochet regime had systematically repressed and killed its political
opponents in Chile as well as internationally, mentioning the CIA-backed
"Operación Condor," a coordinated effort by the
Southern Cone dictatorships for the exchange of information and prisoners
with the intent of totally suffocating any opposition to the antidemocratic
regimes in the region. The Report also clearly established that there had
been a systematic effort to silence all opposition and at the same time,
denounced the creation of a state of terror for a large sector of the population,
while a minority received all of the benefits. The Report's emphasis, nonetheless,
was on Truth and Reconciliation. An important feature of the strategy in
the Report was never to mention those who had committed the crimes. The
Report, at the same time, never tried to account for how many had been imprisoned,
how many had been tortured, how many had been forced to leave the country,
how many had lost their jobs and were subjected to blacklisting, etc. It
was a nicely mounted institutional decree to impose amnesia on the notion
of Justice.
The Rettig Report was a nightmarish pathos because the victims were forced
to relive the whole experience of violence imposed on their bodies and those
of their sons, daughters, husbands, and executed and disappeared lovers.
Nevertheless, the victims were never allowed to face their abusers, nor
name them nor bring them to justice.
Many organizations, including the Families of the Disappeared, received
the Report with reservations. They welcomed the efforts, but continued to
emphasize the role of Justice. For them, and many of us, the question was
about Truth and Justice, as we understood that there could be no reconciliation
if all the pain and suffering was ours to carry. On top of that, we were
supposed to behave as "good Christians" according to the prevailing
Christian Democratic discourse. Therefore, we had to pardon our executioners
and torturers and had to also reconcile with them. It was a treacherous
moral duty imposed on those who had been victimized. Finally, the report
never mentioned even a word of repentance or an apology from Pinochet or
any of his subordinates. They could go about their business, as they had
carefully protected themselves from ever being touched by the Chilean courts.
When the Rettig Commission completed its inquiry in 1991, the former foe
of Allende read the main points on national TV. This time Aylwin shed tears,
as he read: "...we hope that these kinds of atrocities will never happen
again in our country." It was a clean deal; one of the main political
enemies of Allende headed the pacted transition to democracy; the military
went to their barracks with honor; the right wing parties which had enjoyed
total privilege for the remaking of the economy in their image and likeness
had finally sealed their constitutional arrangements.
The final blow was once again on Chilean people, since the reconciliation
rested on our shoulders. Meanwhile, the victors roamed freely on the streets
of Chile or went shopping in Miami or even London, for that matter. It was
a moment of defeat and darkness that made it difficult to believe Bertold
Brecht who had once eloquently said: "even in the darkest of times
there will be songs. There will be songs about the darkest of times."
When the report appeared, I was in Chile doing research. With frustration,
we commented about the treachery of the pact and how the institutional spectacle
of remembering of the Rettig Report had further suppressed the possibility
for Justice. I thought that we would never be able to bring justice to those
who had enjoyed total power for sixteen years, while we had been hunted
like criminals.
So when I picked up the newspaper on October eighteenth and read on the
front page that Scotland Yard had taken Pinochet into custody, I was happy
to find I had been wrong. My doubts about my own philosophical tenets regarding
hegemonic power had not materialized. For a long time, I have believed the
notion that power is never total, that in the quest to create total hegemony,
somehow a counter hegemonic move can take place. So let Bertold Brecht sing
again from the darkest hour, illuminating the possibility of change.
Immediately after the arrest, Margaret Thatcher came to the defense of her
friend and partner in the construction of the unfair neo-liberal economic
model. She recalled what a good friend of England he had been during the
Falklands War. Thus, how could England repay its allies in this harsh and
unfair way, especially those who had helped in maintaining Englnd's residual
archaic imperial possessions?
Soon, Pinochet's lawyers and friends started to appeal to the international
community to liberate the self-appointed Senator-for-Life. Their appeal
was based on humanitarian grounds. It was almost a joke in bad taste. How
could they appeal a case on humanitarian grounds for a man who had maintained
himself in power by the pure force of violence? Pinochet and his friends
are desmemoriados --they have lost their memories, or their memory
selection has never included the Memory of Blood that they inscribed in
our psyche.
I remember...
In August of 1986, in the middle of the dictatorial period, I received a
letter from Chile from my dear friend, journalist José Carrasco Tapia.
He wanted to visit the United States to talk about his work so he asked
me to get him a couple of invitations from journalist associations here.
José Carrasco Tapia and I had spent a long year in different concentration
camps and torture houses during 1975 and we were both finally exiled in
1976. José had returned to Chile in 1984. Soon after his arrival,
he had been elected president of the National Association of Journalists
and had become a very prominent voice of dissent. The government didn't
want him to return, but they could not stop international pressure and his
journalism had become a thorn in the side for the regime.
I was never able to put José in touch with journalist associations
in the U.S. because a month after he wrote, at the edge of dawn on September
8, 1986, the "Special Personnel"--as they used to call themselves--came
for him once again. They dragged him outdoors in his pajamas, and took him
away in a van as his wife watched helplessly. It was around 5:00 AM.
At dawn these state-paid kidnappers stopped in the outskirts of Santiago,
and walked towards a wall that was along the road. Some people whose houses
faced the wall heard the van and peeked through the windows. They later
declared that they saw a group of armed plainclothes policemen who took
a man out of the van. The men shouted at him, insisting that he keep his
pajama shirt over his head. They put him against the wall and hit him, forcing
him to kneel and threatened him not to look around. Then one of the men
put a machine-gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. Thirteen
bullets were shot into the back of his head. All this happened ten blocks
from his brother's house, who had no idea that the horrific scene was taking
place.
José Carrasco Tapia left three sons, his wife, and a legacy of brave
journalism. Now, the people in the neighborhood where he was killed have
built a shrine and keep flowers and lighted candles in it at all times.
He used to live in that neighborhood when he was a boy. Now people come
to pray and to ask him for favors. My friend has become a saint.
José Carrasco's widow and sons, and many of the relatives of the
thousands of victims have never been able to bring the perpetuators to a
civil court and try them. This basic democratic right has been denied by
the Chilean justice in a "pacted democracy."
In a couple of days, Pinochet's fate will be decided by the Lords in England.
A strange travesty of justice, a self-appointed senator and ex-dictator
judged by Lords who have enjoyed their power since medieval times. It seems
that the verdict is no longer important, because the "Londonazo"
has opened a Pandora's box of memories that had been preventing a healthy
transition to true democracy in Chile. The whole event has unleashed suppressed
memories and finally exposed institutional efforts at concealing the past.
This morning I received another e-mail from a friend who works at La Fundación
Villa Grimaldi, the infamous torture center where José Carrasco Tapia
and I spent time as Desaparecidos. With the effort of ex-political
prisoners and their friends, the place has been converted into the "Park
of Peace," for remembering what happened to thousands of Chileans in
those dark times. My friend tells me that they are asking people to send
them stories, paintings, songs, poems, or whatever we have so they can post
everything on their Web Site -- http://members.xoom.com/grimaldi/. They plan to later publish a book on remembering Villa
Grimaldi and the "Special Personnel" of the DINA.
As a epilogue
It does not really matter any longer if Pincochet goes free, or if Margaret
Thatcher's colonial plea is upheld by the Lords. What matters is that the
"Londonazo" has begun to create the possibilities for the
formation of a strong discourse on the Memory of Blood which has problematized
the seamless historical narrative of a "moderm" Chile. I hope
that this accident of history creates also the possibility for Justice for
thousands of Chileans who have endured the institutional silencing of their
pain for one too many years. José Carrasco Tapia wouldn't have wanted
it any other way.
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