Tur histórico

I'm sitting in Rachael's room, waiting for her to come back from a hike she went on today! I'm enjoying a Corona (with lemon, not lime grr), especially because today was heavy. Our tour was led by a history teacher from the University of Chile in Santiago. It was a modern political history tour, so we spent the day absorbing the causes, events and effects of the political situation in Chile during Allende and Pinochet. We also touched a bit on the presidencies and elections before Allende's term, but mainly the tour was to give historical background to the dictatorship.

The tour was really well done. We started off by watching a video released by the "Augosto Pinochet Foundation" (or something of that sort) in the late 1980s. It was, all around, pro-Pinochet and laudatory of the military government. The video presented the situation with Allende's election, starting with his minimal electoral win and moving into the chaos and disorder that came about under his presidency. When it got to the overthrow of Allende's government, triumphant music played and after a brief demonstration of the bomb attacks on La Moneda, the presidential palace, footage of hugging and shaking-hands politicians showed how turning over the government to new hands was done civilly and with much support. Chile stabilized, chaos was over, and people no longer were waiting on long lines for food.

The professor followed up the video with more analysis of what was discussed, and explained the basis on which the military government legitimized the overthrow--in summary, on the grounds that Allende's government was violating the Chilean Constitution. Obviously, this entry could be an essay on the arguments and circumstances of the situation from both the left and right. I'm going to have to skip the detail, but what was important was that we started off the day with the conservative, anti-Allende/pro-overthrow point of view. It's so important because in a room full of american students abroad, there is no doubt the the majority if not all of them are partial to the ANTI-overthrow side, in that what is so well known about this history are the horrible violations of human rights that occurred. Moreover, there is no doubt that Chile was in a bad way for a lot of people under Allende's government--there was chaos, there was disorder--there was a socialistic system underway which was something entirely new and even frightening for people, especially considering the context of the Cold War.

So after hearing more details about Allende's program called "la via chilena a socialismo" (the Chilean path towards socialism), and how it faced problems and the objections of the plan within the government, the group left for the rest of the tour with a perspective in our minds we weren't used to walking around with (not to say that a lot of us didn't already know this part of the history, though there is no doubt that some didn't).

Next stop was the cemetery where all the Chilean presidents except Pinochet and Gabriel Gonzalez Videla are buried, El Cementerio General. Here was where the professor was able to tell us more about the history, from a less anti-allende point of view, such as his programs that focused on equality, as well including what went wrong with those programs--or objectively speaking, what could be problematic.

El Cementerio General

Our tour guide, next to the grave of Orlando Letelier, who was ambassador to the US under Allende. While speaking out about the situation under Pinochet, Ortelier was assassinated in Washington, DC, where he was working at the Institute for Policy Studies.


Salvador Allende's burial tomb. What is incredible is that cross of Jesus peeking through. Allende was agnostic, and being that his commemorative tomb--made for all Chilean presidents--was made under the military government, many think this was a way to disrespect his memorial. (I can't remember or am not sure there is any significance to the design of the site)


Commemorating some of the names of the desaparecidos--those that went missing during the dictatorship--and other victims of the government. Salvador Allende is in the middle to demonstrate that he is considered the first victim. It says at the top, "All of my love is here and remains stuck to the rocks, the ocean, the mountains."

But what was most impressionable was our trip to the concentration camp/detention center in the outskirts of Santiago that was an unofficial and unknown/secret camp for torture called Villa Grimaldi. Here the dark, dark side of the dictatorship was very real. The professor explained the memorial park and each of its symbols--the park is filled with symbolic structures and references, as the photos show more specifically. It's horrifying to hear the stories, especially knowing that not a single recounting of the story can relay what it must have been like. The memorial of the camp though tragic, is beautiful. All the mosaic pieces around the camp come from original parts of the large house that was originally here.

When prisoners were brought in to the camp they were lined up around this circle and beat until they were no longer standing. Surrounding this circle were thousands of roses. This was part of the psychological torture, which was to fill the noses of the prisoners with a scent usually associated to love, and spring etc. Prisoners always had their eyes covered and hands and feet tied, so their experience in the camp is very much so tied to smell. The entire camp ground was filled with these roses--other memories of the roses include how along paths prisoners would walk and feel the spikes of the roses scrape their ankles.

These are dedicated to the women tortured here. This again refers to the theme of roses, trying to take back what the camp turned the symbol into.

The grid-form of the trees and squares are designed this way to represent the way each prisoner would always walk in lines with their arms on the person's shoulder infront of them. That small house was where prisoners were kept for the majority of the day, be it for days, weeks or months. It would hold up to 12 people.

What made and makes my stomach turn the most is observing how a nation with this kind of traumatic experience handles it. While, yes, I can even say--despite papers and research and readings denouncing the dictatorship--that Allende's program was unsustainable, and people needed a change, what came of the dictatorship, and the way the chaos "ended" and "stability" arose was inexcusable. "stability" came because women were raped by men and dogs, parents were tortured in front of their children, electrocuted, ate on their knees with hands and feet tied, were tossed from planes into the pacific in bags--stability was around because chileans lived constantly under the sense of terror.

Last semester in Kenyon, we read a book in my history class about dictators and military governments in Latin America and the tool TERROR they use. While families watched their sons and daughters and mothers and father disappear, become desaparecidos, not only was deep emotional trauma caused but a true fear of the government, facing the fact that their government was ready to use the most inhumane of tools to keep its people pacified, in the name of stability. The professor explained how the perpetrators of torture, the soldiers that were doing the torturing and have been in jail for some years, have all been tried and convicted as perpetrators on a personal level, not an institutional level--the atrocities that happened haven't be called a corruption of the state, rather horrific acts by individual actors "losing their minds with their newfound power." To me, this is the kind of thing that has lasting effects. This is why I've met Chilean youth that don't want to talk about it, are quick to remind me there's another perspective, that say "why keep protesting if it's in the past." Many Chileans haven't accepted what happened--or if they have, they want that to mean their in the right to move on from it.

I'm in a class here called Collective Memory in Chile that has been looking at this problem exactly. We've read and talked about how all these horrible events are going forgotten, because people don't want to remember, people to want to face it. It's understandable, but so unacceptable. A democracy needs honesty, right? What happens if Chileans don't remember these events when it is undeniably a part of the Chilean identity? It also makes me think about the States. Haven't we, more or less, already forgotten about how our government responded to Hurricane Katrina? Do schools all over America do a good job of making its students remember and reflect on slavery? 9/11? Whether or not we are for or against traumatic things that have happened in our nations, we need to remember not only their historical and political implications but their emotional implications--i think those are what give us our identity as a unified country, what identifies us as citizens of the USA.