Ariel Dorfman on Obama's Upcoming Visit to Chile

Barack Obama and Sebastián Piñera

Ariel Dorfman has published an editorial today in Spain's El País on President Obama's upcoming visit to Chile titled "Obama y el dolor de Chile" ("Obama and the Pain of Chile"). In the editorial he suggests that Obama visit with former exiles and children of the disappeared; go to the newly inaugurated Museo de la Memoria and get to know Villa Grimaldi, the former detention and torture center that is now the Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace. This is the first paragraph, with my translation in italics.

Cuando Barack Obama desembarque en Chile el próximo lunes en una visita de 24 horas, algo crucial va a faltar en su agenda. Habrá mariscos suculentos y discursos que elogien la prosperidad de Chile, acuerdos bilaterales y encuentros con los poderosos y los pomposos, pero no hay planes, sin duda, de que el presidente de Estados Unidos tome contacto con lo que fue la experiencia fundamental de la reciente historia chilena, el trauma que el pueblo de mi país padeció durante los casi 17 años del régimen del general Augusto Pinochet.

When Barack Obama lands in Chile next Monday on a 24-hour visit, something critical will be lacking in his agenda. There will be delicious seafood and speeches praising Chile's prosperity, bilateral agreements and meetings with the pompous and powerful, but there are absolutely no plans for the U.S. president to come in contact with what was the key experience in recent Chilean history, the trauma that the people of my country suffered for the almost 17 years of General Augusto Pinochet's regime. 

Dorfman goes on to explain why he believes Obama must address Chile's dictatorial past while in Chile (again, my translation follows in italics):

Una razón por la cual tiene sentido que Obama haga todo lo posible por vislumbrar, aunque fuera a través de un vidrio oscuro, nuestra vasta y devastadora pena, es que los norteamericanos fueron, en gran parte, responsables de aquella tragedia. Washington ayudó, alentó y financió la caída del Gobierno democráticamente elegido de Allende y la trayectoria dictatorial de Pinochet.

 One reason why Obama must do everything he can to make clearer, albeit through a dark lens, our vast and devastating pain, is that Americans were, in large part, responsible for that tragedy [that of the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the Pinochet regime]. Washington helped, encouraged and financed the fall of Allende's democratically-elected government and the dictatorial trajectory of Pinochet.

Dorfman's editorial does not go so far as to propose President Obama apologize for U.S. involvement and support of the Pinochet regime. In fact, he expressly states that that gesture, in his view, is unnecessary. What Dorfman would like instead is all the more simple and brief, but full of symbolism nonetheless: he wants Obama to visit the tomb of Salvador Allende and observe a few moments of silence, a gesture Dorfman believes will send the message to Chile, all of Latin America and the entire planet ("y de hecho a todo el planeta") that the U.S. is ushering in a new era of relations with its Latin American neighbors.

I applaud Dorfman's intentions in his editorial column. Certainly, more people -- especially in the U.S. -- need to inform themselves about American support of right-wing dictators in Latin America. For doubters,  plenty of de-classified state documents exist -- some of which are linked on this blog -- to help illustrate the U.S. role in funding and aiding otherwise the military dictatorships of the entire Southern Cone. I don't think, however, that Dorfman is being realistic about the kind of president that Obama has thusfar shown himself to be.

In his editorial, Dorfman resurrects the name of Bobby Kennedy, citing him as an example for Obama to follow. In the 60s, Kennedy visited with Chilean president Eduardo Frei (leader of the Christian Democratic Party and president just prior to Allende) and met with Chilean miners and angry Communist students protesting the former's visit. In Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur Schesslinger recounts part of that visit, and quotes Kennedy's remarks after meeting with the Chilean miners: "'If I worked in this mine,' Kennedy told a Chilean reporter, 'I'd be a Communist too'" (p. 696).

Has Dorfman been paying attention to American politics since Obama's election? First of all, Obama has largely disappointed the (true) left in this country, due to what they perceive to be his largely centrist position on nearly every important issue out there. Second, one of the rallying cries of the (extreme) right has been to call Obama a "Socialist" or a "Communist," often mixing the terms beyond recognition into a hodgepodge of McCarthy-era rhetoric (sometimes, unbelievably, these terms have been mixed with Obama as "Fascist" or even "Nazi"). So, let's imagine what Obama's visit to Chile would be like were he to follow Dorfman's suggestions.

Most likely, were we to see Obama at Allende's tomb, the right would immediately gravitate once more to the idea of foreign Obama, socialist Obama, radical America-hater Obama. Everyone knows Allende is a hero of the left. So, Obama linking himself to Allende, even in this brief appearance, would just feed into the right's fear-mongering machine. While the left might find the gesture laudable, they would also have reason to complain, for Obama has not demonstrated this kind of public presidential presence stateside. For example, the left might ask why Obama isn't standing with the Wisconsin workers protesting the end to their collective bargaining rights.

Nonetheless, as Dorfman reminds us, President Obama will be dining in the same Presidential palace where Salvador Allende died "en defensa del derecho de su pueblo a elegir su propio destino" ("in defense of his people's right to elect their own destiny"). It is difficult to imagine how his entire visit could go by with no mention of the tragic Chilean past. Unfortunately, however, the President's political identity has been shaped less by his risk-taking and more by his acquiescence to the ever-shifting Overton window. Like Clinton, Obama's desire to be "post-political" and "post-partisan," always seeking compromise, has only served to his disadvantage.

In Chile, Obama will be meeting with President Sebastián Piñera. Though perhaps not as visible a meeting as that between Obama and Hu Jin Tao, this encounter will be still put under a microscope, as will Obama's other Latin American stops. While Ariel Dorfman's position in his editorial is certainly understandable and reasonable, given Chile's recent past, it is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will acknowledge anything regarding Allende or the Pinochet dictatorship. In fact, the nuclear issue has already taken precedence, as The Santiago Times reported Wednesday that Pres. Piñera has announced a nuclear agreement with the U.S. (see also today's NYT, "Undeterred by Fallout Fears....").

"Nostalgia for the Light" (dir. Patricio Guzmán) opens Friday in New York

In my first few months of college, I met a Chilean graduate student that was studying geology. I wanted to talk about Neruda, and he was more than happy to oblige. Naturally, my friend was fascinated with rocks, so much so that when traveling, he often had to declare extra weight for the containers of earth he transported back and forth. The shelves in his office were lined with geodes, fossils and amber, but anything related to science intrigued him deeply. I often had the sense Ohio was incredibly disappointing to him -- geographically dull, relatively young in the grand scheme of things, and too populated with mall and parking lot lights to get a good view of the night sky. Nonetheless, I accompanied him on several excursions -- once, to keep watch for the comet Hale-Bopp, and later, during a field work expedition in Punta Arenas, near the Strait of Magellan. Though he was made of many things, earth and The Earth were integral parts of his identity. Sometimes, I have the feeling it is so for most Chileans. Maybe it has to do with the incredibly varied nature of the Chilean landscape, the frequency of earthquakes or the long, narrow boundary lines of the country itself. Earlier on this blog, I attempted to address similar questions after the miners were rescued.

Patricio Guzmán is one of Chile's most well-known documentarians, and his work is essential for anyone interested in memory and human rights. His most famous quote, also on the front page of his website, is "Un país sin cine documental es como un país sin album de fotografías" ("A country without documentary film is like a country without a photo album"). The trailer for his new film, "Nostalgia for the Light," opens by addressing the Atacama desert. A NYT review calls the documentary, which opens Friday in Greenwich Village, a "meditation on astronomy, archeology, geology and human rights."

For more information, see the film's official website here. I will report back on the blog after I've seen it, but in the meantime, if anyone would like to share initial reactions, please do so using the comment feature of this post.



Read more here:
Review in Reverse Shot
Review in Slant Magazine
Interview in Filmmaker Magazine 

View brief clips here:
Clip 1  
Clip 2
Clip 3

On Chile

the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda

 In 2000, I decided to go to Chile during my spring break. I made the decision as I always made travel decisions back then -- hmnnn, I think I'll go abroad for awhile. It wasn't a completely random choice. Chile had been on my mind for almost 10 years by then. In high school, my mother had given me my first Neruda book, a bilingual edition with translations by W.S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Nathaniel Tarn and Anthony Kerrigan (for the record, of the four translators, I tend to prefer Merwin and Reid. But why read Neruda in translation if you don't have to?). I absolutely devoured this book, especially the love poems. But later I discovered simple things Neruda (the odes), Spanish Civil War Neruda (Spain in the Heart), the Neruda I read with friends. I found out about Isla Negra, and I wanted to see it. I decided to go to Chile to visit Neruda's three homes in Santiago, Valparaíso (where my college friend Luis lives) and Isla Negra. Because my friend is a geologist, and was going to be doing field work in the Punta Arenas area, I also made plans to go there.

Before I went to Chile, I had only visited Mexico and Spain. Being in Chile was a little like going to California when you have only been to the east coast (or vice-versa). Stepping off the plane, there is a distinct sense that you are. . . elsewhere. Part of it has to do with the change in seasons, but it's also just the "vibe" of the country. I only saw a fraction of the country, but it made a big impression on me to go from Santiago to Viña del Mar to Valparaíso to Isla Negra to Punta Arenas. The difference in temperatures, pace, amount of people and general landscape was pretty significant.

My visit was incredible. I left the end of winter and entered the end of summer. People swarmed the beach at Viña del Mar. My friend and I started in Valparaíso, with its inclines and sea-worn buildings. Now that I've been in San Francisco, I can say Valparaíso reminds me a bit of being there. Or the other way around. I love being near "the sea" and having that smell in the air. I would love to wake with a view of water -- who wouldn't? In Neruda's house, one of his rooms -- I can't recall which at the moment -- looked right out onto the water. No one was allowed to photograph anything inside the house, but one could be photographed with the view of the sea in the background. I tried to imagine Neruda writing with that backdrop, drinking wine with friends, reading. I tried to imagine the house totally ransacked, his rows of books in ruins on the floor, after the '73 coup, just days before his death.

Recently, like many other people, I've had Chile on my mind for reasons other than Neruda. The earthquake, the bicentennial, the ongoing news about the miners, and the fact that I haven't stopped listening to this CD for the last month, have all put Chile (phonetically, she lay, as my friend would say) back in my everyday thoughts.

Driving home from work last week, I was listening to a report on the rescue of the miners. Isabel Allende was talking. Shortly after Chile's independence day (September 18), she had visited the mine site and now she was reflecting on this emotional moment for the country as a whole. She never mentioned a word about Chile's military dictatorship, never said a thing about the disappeared, but in my own mind, I could not help associating these "disappeared" miners, now being "appeared" and released from the earth, with those who were disappeared and never returned. Strangely, the rescue gave Chile back its own sons in a way that has never been possible for those who vanished under Pinochet. The fact that Isabel Allende - whose father was Socialist Salvador Allende's first cousin -- was standing beside President Sebastián Piñera, a right-wing millionaire, was also quite a symbolic moment, I thought. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything, but the image of the two together seemed to bring the past to a scene that had been concentrating very much on the present, on the extremely delicate, day-to-day, minute-by-minute operations of bringing the miners to the earth's surface.

Isabel Allende beside President Sebastián Piñera (photo from here)

Lo and behold, just one day after I heard the interview with Isabel Allende, I read this article in the NYT, which reflects on the site of the mine rescue as a site of memory inextricably linked to the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship: "In the predawn hours of Oct. 17, 1973 — 37 years before the mine rescue, almost to the day — military personnel murdered 16 men near here, including some who worked for Chile’s state mining company." These men, the article goes on to say, were 16 of 70 that the "Caravan of Death" murdered that month in Chile. One of the victim's sisters said that "The experience with the 33 miners made us relive every moment. . . Finding them alive and then rescuing them was like finding my brother again.”

The mine rescue, and the connection of the site with a previous traumatic history, illustrate the fact that sites of memory do not just remain stable representatives of the same story, but evolve over time, depending on historical and political circumstances. Although it is quite different, I am reminded of the Valle de los Caídos site in Spain, currently back in the news again as the Spanish government debates whether or not to make it into a "center for memory."

The most striking symbol of Valle de los Caídos is the gigantic cross that marks its location. The site is visited largely by tourists, but also used to be where the ultra right gathered every November 20 (the anniversary of Franco's death), until the 2007 Law of Historical Memory made that illegal. Many people don't realize that Valle was built by slave labor under Franco in the 50s. Many also don't know that, buried on the altar (!) of the church inside are Franco himself and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Spanish fascist party, Falange. In addition to Franco, many of the Civil War dead are also buried in the walls of what some have called Spain's largest "mass grave." What to do with this enormous structure, which still houses a Benedictine monastery, remains unclear. However, one thing is certain -- the site's identity has undergone a series of revisions over the past several years. In my view, these revisions are necessary, and transforming the site into a Center for Memory would give Spain what is still lacks almost 35 years since Franco's death.

"Revising" a site of memory like the area of the mine rescue or the Valle de los Caídos site should not mean eclipsing its past history. Ideally -- and it sounds cliché -- we could use the past struggles there to inform the present use of the site. In 1973, miners were murdered where in 2010, they were rescued. What does this mean? Is it just a coincidence? Or can the rescue ultimately allow healing of other kinds?

I'll be writing a bit more about Chile here soon. I have a post planned about the rapper Ana Tijoux. For now,  I'll just say that if you haven't been to this magnificent country, I highly recommend it. One day, I hope to return for a longer visit. In some ways, I know only an "imagined Chile" informed by Neruda and the folksinger Víctor Jara. What is the everyday Chile? It still seems a bit mysterious to me. So much is informed by what lies below ground -- fault lines, the disappeared, miners descending to the earth's pit. What is it to live with the knowledge of unstable tierra, the possibility of tremors and aftershocks? Surely, this awareness comes with its own kind of memory.

Documentary: "Mi vida con Carlos" ("My Life with Carlos")

First viewed on the Spanish blog, El blog del cine español.

'My Life with Carlos' is the journey of a son (director German Berger-Hertz) trying to learn the truth about his father, who was killed in 1973 in Pinochet's Chile. Deeply-personal, poetic, and suspenseful, the film chronicles the heroic actions that led to Carlos Berger's death and the devastating effect it had on his family. In this powerful cinematic document, Berger-Hertz confronts not only the horrors of his country's past but also his own.

Winner, Best Documentary at the San Diego Latino Film Festival
Voted Top Ten Audience favorite at Hot Docs
Winner, Best Film and Audience Award at the Biarritz FF, Winner, Best Film, Young Jury Award, Audience Award at the Rencontres du Cinema Marseille
Winner, Best Film at the Lleida Film Festival
Winner, Critics' Award at the Malaga Film Festival
Official Selection, Rotterdam International Film Festival
Official Selection, Goteborg Film Festival
Official Selection, Latinbeat - Film Society of Lincoln Center

My Life With Carlos TRAILER from German Berger on Vimeo.

The Legacy of the Pinochet Dictatorship

The opening of a new Museum of Memory for victims of the Pinochet regime and the surprising election of a right-wing president have put Chile at the top of the "Americas" headlines in the NYT. The following article chronicles the justice-seeker Ana González, and talks about a recent TV DNA campaign to help families locate the remains of their loved ones who "disappeared" during the dirty war. This quote, from the end of the article, is worth highlighting: "'I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,' she said, her eyes welling up for a moment. But, she said, 'How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?'"

For those interested in seeing the videoclip to which the article makes reference, I've posted it below (it is in Spanish, but I've translated to English the words that appear on the screen):



"If you are the family member of a person who disappeared during the military dictatorship, a simple blood sample can help identify the remains located thus far and those yet to be identified. National campaign. Blood samples taken free of charge. Results confidential."

From: The New York Times

January 23, 2010
The Saturday Profile

A Serene Advocate for Chile’s Disappeared
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

SANTIAGO, Chile

ON the morning of April 30, 1976, Ana González and her husband, a Communist Party member named Manuel Recabarren, were in a rush to get out of the house.

It was the third year of the murderous Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Two of the couple’s sons, Luis Emilio and Manuel Guillermo, along with Luis Emilio’s pregnant wife, Nalvia, had failed to return from work the evening before. Ominously, their 2 ½-year-old son had shown up later that night crying on a neighbor’s lawn.

Mrs. González was eager to get to her job at the water company to ask her manager for an advance on her pay and temporary leave, so she could look for her children. But she volunteered to stay behind to look after another grandson while her husband searched.

“You go ahead, and I’ll come later with the child,” she said.

She never again saw her husband, or her sons and daughter-in-law, nor did she hear a word about their fates. All four are believed to have been “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, which came to power in a bloody 1973 coup that claimed the life of Chile’s Socialist president, Salvador Allende.

In the 34 years that followed, Mrs. González transformed her outrage and grief into a tireless advocacy for answers about the estimated 3,000 people who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.

She participated in hunger strikes and sit-ins during the Pinochet years, pushed judges to investigate suspected atrocities and traveled to the United States seeking to pressure Chile’s military government to release information about the missing.

Her broad face and sad eyes — and the way photographs of her loved ones often hung from her neck — became emblematic of Chile’s long struggle to unearth the truth. Beyond her courage, Mrs. González’s soothing voice, cutting sense of humor and unrelenting optimism helped break through the indifference of the many Chileans who were unaffected by the years of violence, human rights leaders said.

“They never thought that a woman, a housewife who didn’t know anything, not even where the courts were located, would take up the battle cry,” said Mrs. González, now 84, in an interview in the same modest home on Santiago’s outskirts where she lived with her husband and children. Faded pictures of her missing family members still hang in the dining room.

Last year, her grandmotherly image landed on posters and in television advertisements as part of a government campaign to link DNA samples from family members with the scattered remains of presumed victims of the regime’s torture centers.

In the posters and TV ads, Mrs. González, her gray hair pulled back into her signature bun, is reaching out with a red flower as men and women from younger generations stand behind her.

“Today, there are many bones that need to be identified so that one day families can mourn their losses,” Mrs. González said.

The new campaign was part of an effort by the departing president, Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture victim of the military regime, to revamp a DNA-matching program that previously had misidentified remains.

The campaign Mrs. González participated in — “You live in us, we carry you in our blood” — urged Chileans who lost loved ones during the regime to submit DNA samples that experts could then match with unidentified remains. So far, only six victims have been identified, but the government expects to announce more matches soon, officials say.

MRS. GONZÁLEZ was born in a small town in the far north of Chile. Her mother, who had been widowed with six children, married a railroad worker, and Mrs. González was one of their two children.

When she was 11 years old she took a trip to Santiago and ended up staying, living with an aunt and uncle in their house with a dirt floor and an outhouse.

Her uncle regularly bought El Siglo, a Communist Party newspaper, and Mrs. González would try to read it. At school, a classmate talked about Spain under the dictator Franco and the Spanish resistance. “I began to hate Franco,” Mrs. González said.

Her parents later moved to Valparaíso, outside Santiago, and Mrs. González joined them for a time, later returning to Santiago as a teenager. Then one day when she was 16, a young man invited her to a meeting of the Young Communists. “I discovered a new world at that meeting,” she said. “I loved it.”

It was among the Young Communists that she met the love of her life, Manuel Recabarren.

They were married in 1944. Over the years they had six children, and remained active in the Communist Party.

After Mr. Allende was elected in 1970, Mr. Recabarren headed a local Committee of Provisions and Prices, which distributed food. After the coup in 1973, the military disbanded the committees, which had been headed nationally by Alberto Bachelet, the future president’s father. As a former committee head, however, Mr. Recabarren was a marked man. So, too, were the three relatives who were snatched, all of whom were Communist Party members.

The day after her husband disappeared, Mrs. González found an anonymous note at her home that left little doubt that he had been seized by the regime.

“Go to the Vicaría de la Solidaridad,” the note read, referring to a human rights organization set up by the Roman Catholic Church. It was where everyone went for help once their loved ones vanished. Later, survivors of the Villa Grimaldi torture center said they had last seen her husband there in August 1976.

To this day Mrs. González feels blessed but sad to consider what might have been. “If the child and I had left with my husband that day, I also would have been disappeared,” she said, dragging deeply on a cigarette.

Instead, Mrs. González began to organize with other families of the disappeared, holding demonstrations that the Pinochet security forces would break up.

But Mrs. González was never intimidated. She continued to organize protests, including hunger strikes at churches, embassies and the offices of the Red Cross and the United Nations.

“SHE was on the front lines, showing tremendous courage,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “Without her courage, more people probably would have been disappeared, and the national attention to this would have been close to zero.”

Mr. Vivanco said that Mrs. González symbolized something else. “She represents the voice of somebody with no hatred,” he said. “She talks about her case and human rights in Chile in a calm, serene way. She has been able to speak to many Chileans who never suffered in the dictatorship or who publicly supported the repression.”

Mrs. González remains active in human rights affairs and said she was working on a book about her life. She ran the large red beads of her necklace through her hands as she thought back on her campaign for the missing.

“I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,” she said, her eyes welling up for a moment.

But, she said, “How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?”

Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago.

After 28 Years, Charges for Poisoning Former Chilean President

From: The New York Times
December 8, 2009

Three in Chile Accused of 1980s Crime
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

RIO DE JANEIRO — A judge in Santiago ruled Monday that a former Chilean president, Eduardo Frei Montalva, had been poisoned and charged three people connected with the Pinochet dictatorship with murder in the 28-year-old case.

Alejandro Madrid, a judge with the Court of Appeals, said there was evidence that Mr. Frei, who was president of Chile from 1964 to 1970, was poisoned with low doses of mustard gas and thallium three months before his death on Jan. 22, 1982.

The poisoning at the Santa María Clinic in Chile’s capital compromised Mr. Frei’s immune system, the indictment said, and made him too weak to survive surgery for a stomach ailment, which the original autopsy had ruled as the cause of death.

The indictment charged six people in connection with the killing. A doctor connected to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s army, a former intelligence agent under the general and Mr. Frei’s driver were charged with murder. Two doctors who were alleged to have falsified the autopsy report were charged with covering up the killing, and a third was charged as an accomplice.

Four of the suspects were in custody on Monday night and two had been released on bail.

At the time of his death, Mr. Frei, who at first had supported the dictatorship, had become the leader of the moderate opposition.

He entered Santa María Clinic in November 1981 for a stomach hernia operation. On Dec. 8, he was found in his room bleeding profusely and suffering from septic shock. Diagnosed with an intestinal obstruction, he was whisked into surgery. A few weeks later he died.

His family had long contended that he had been poisoned.

“There is no doubt that Pinochet ordered this murder,” Álvaro Varela, a lawyer for the Frei family, said in an interview on Monday. “But there are more people involved with different degrees of responsibility and more leads to follow.”

The revelations in the indictment came less than a week before presidential elections in which Senator Eduardo Frei, the son of the late president and a former president himself, is the candidate of the governing Concertación coalition.

The campaign of the opposition candidate Sebastián Piñera questioned the indictment’s timing, saying it may have been intended to build sympathy for Mr. Frei, who is trailing in polls by some 10 percentage points.

Judge Madrid responded by saying that “justice has to be done when the time comes for it,” and noting that when the investigation began in 2000, Mr. Frei was neither a candidate nor a senator.

Mr. Varela said the possibility that Mr. Frei had been murdered first came to light in 2000 when an anonymous caller told a friend of the Frei family that the former president had been poisoned.

Carmen Frei, a daughter of Mr. Frei and a former senator, said in an address to the Senate in 2001 that her father might have been injected with bacteria produced by Eugenio Berríos, a chemist who worked for the military intelligence service. A 2002 book by Jorge Molina, “Imperfect Crime,” also alleged that Mr. Berríos had developed bacteria that were administered to Mr. Frei by intelligence agents. Mr. Berríos was killed in Uruguay in 1995.

A Chilean court agreed to exhume Mr. Frei’s body in 2004. A new autopsy showed the presence of toxic substances and other differences from the original autopsy.

Mr. Frei’s death “was due to the gradual introduction of non-conventional toxic substances,” Judge Madrid told reporters on Monday.

Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago, Chile.

Víctor Jara's second funeral

I only recently learned that the Chilean folksinger Víctor Jara was buried on my birthday. This week, on the way to work, I was listening to Jara sing, thinking about the first time I heard his voice on a trip to Chile nearly 10 years ago. I was only in the country for a short time, but the singer's image was everywhere, along with that of Mercedes Sosa and Violeta Parra, and I became intrigued (plus, my Chilean friend Luis had given me a book and tape of Parra's poemsongs before my trip). The lyrics of this song by Víctor Jara, "Canto libre" ("Free Song"), have stuck with me:




In the song, Jara sings, "Mi canto es un canto libre / que se quiere regalar / a quien le estreche su mano / a quien quiera disparar" (My song is a free song / that wants to give of itself / to whoever extends his hand / to whoever wants to fire upon it) and "Mi canto es una cadena / sin comienzo ni final / y en cada eslabón se encuentra / el canto de los demás" (My song is a chain / with no beginning or end / and on each link of the chain is found / the song of all the rest)."

These words are especially significant when we think of Jara's torture and death shortly after the Chilean September 11 (1973) - the coup which put Pinochet in power. The most recent autopsy reports, which took place in June 2009, identified 44 bullet wounds in Jara's body, as well as evidence of other torture.

Yesterday, 36 years after his death, a wake was held in Chile for Víctor Jara, attended by his widow, Joan Turner, his children, and the president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet. In addition, some 10,000 others attended to honor the singer. In the president's words, "Our country has taken 36 years to return him to Chile and to his family, this Víctor that is ours, that is all of ours" ("Se ha demorado nuestro país 36 años en devolverle a Chile y devolverle a su familia, este Víctor que es nuestro, es de todos nosotros"). A funeral will be held today at 10 am, Chilean time.

Perhaps because I've studied the Spanish case much more than that of Chile, the public funeral for Jara reminds me of some of the more private commemorations and "reburials" that have taken place recently in Spain for the victims of the Franco dictatorship. Everyone deserves to be buried with dignity.