Thursday, September 11, 2003

An excuse

This is my heritage, my legacy--what I bring to the world rattling behind me, ghosts of a whispered past that I was not a part of, chains and blood and mangled corpses. Books and a presidential palace burning. The world turned upside down and inside out.

Father, it's been thirty years since my last confession.

Both El Mercurio and the BBC have the story and pictures of what happened thirty years ago in Chile, free to anyone who seeks to know. Thirty years ago, Augusto Pinochet (may he die in fear), led a coup that ended--started?--with the death of the democratically elected President of the country, Salvador Allende ("the President of Chile does not flee in a plane," he said when offered safe passage) and then, seventeen years of dictatorship. Seventeen years and thousands vanished, murdered by Pinochet and his ilk who turned "to disappear" into something done to your enemies. Thousands "disappearead" and yet more live on to demand some sort of justice, though probably in vain. Well-mannered people, you see, do not speak of maimings and rapes and electrodes and beatings and bludgeonings with lengths of metal chains.

So thirty years ago, Pinochet and friends burned the Presidential Palace and set tanks out to mingle with the few who dared step outside. People were detained, lined up, laid on the floor like leaves in autumn, herded into the Estadio Nacional, which was turned into a center of torture and murder. Books and posters were dragged out into the streets and set on fire. There was martial law and curfews.

My parents--people who have never publicly been involved in politics, and who lean more to the right than the left--my parents lowered their voices whenever September 11 or Allende or the DINA (the Chilean intelligence agency responsible for what was, until September 11 2001, the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil) for years after this happened. Whispering and not talking of these unpleasant things has seeped into the blood of much of the people of Chile. My mother, not long ago, told me that perhaps I shouldn't rant against the US government in public, or on the web. The unspoken consequences left a chill in my spine for days.

So we come to September 11, 2001. More death and fire and firefighters carrying whatever bodies they could find. More people detained with no recourse. More ominous warnings to "watch what [you] say." And then, this: the hijacking of those events to clear the way for war and profits. War on places that had nothing to do with it. Questions of whether the Bush administration could have stopped the attacks from happening silenced. Anyone who doesn't fall in line with this "patriotism" considered almost a terrorist. September 11, 1973 was used in Chile as an excuse for seventeen years to silence its people under a traitor that ruled and destroyed ruthlessly. September 11, 2001, is, I fear, being used in the same way by Bush & Co.

workers surrender to Pinochet's military.
In El Mercurio's site, I found this picture taken on September 11,
1973. The caption read simply, "workers surrender."