Chile's Ghosts: The Tyranny of Forgetting

Late in the afternoon on September 4th,
1970 a crowd gathered in
central Santiago, Chile to celebrate the election of socialist president Salvador Allende.
Among the participants in the celebration were the leftist folk singer Victor
Jara and his wife Joan.

In her book, Victor: An Unfinished Song,
Joan Jara recounts this scene "full of happiness, hugs and tears." People
pushed through the crowd, eager to congratulate Allende. When Joan neared the president-elect
she remembers embracing him in a cathartic, bear-like hug. Allende said to her,
"Hug me harder, companera! This is not a time for timidity!"

The hope of that day ended in bloodshed just
three years later. On September 11th, 1973 Allende was overthrown in a US-backed coup. The
military dictator Augusto Pinochet took power, and led the country in a reign
of terror which left thousands dead, tortured and traumatized. Among the coup's
victims were Victor Jara and Allende.

As part of the crackdown, armed forces
searched the home of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda told the soldiers, "Look
around-there's only one thing of danger for you here-poetry." He died days
later of heart failure, on September 23rd.

Though the dictator and many of his accomplices
have escaped justice - Pinochet died in 2006 at age 91 - the horrors of
Pinochet's reign are widely documented. The bookClandestine in Chile: The
Adventure of Miguel Littin by Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
tells the story of Littin's 1985 return to Chile after living in exile since the coup. The story was
told from Littin's perspective.

Hunkered down in the Basque city of San Sebastian, the leftist laments cutting off his beard in
preparation for his return to Chile under a new identity. "The first thing to go was my
beard. This was not just a simple matter of shaving. The beard had created a
personality for me that I now had to shed." To cushion the shock, he took the
beard off gradually.

Reflecting on Chile under Pinochet, Littin remembers the tireless
struggle of coal miner Sebastian Acevedo, who fought to end the torture of his
twenty-two-year-old son and twenty-year-old daughter. The desperate Acevedo
ultimately warned public officials, journalists and religious leaders, "If you
don't do something to stop the torture of my children, I will soak myself with
gasoline and set myself on fire in the atrium of the [Concepcion] cathedral."
Acevedo followed through with the threat, and became a haunting symbol of the
fight against the dictatorship.

Non-violent demonstrations against
Pinochet's crimes followed the death of Acevedo. Littin described the
confrontation. "The police attacked the group [of protesters] with water canons
while more than two hundred of them, soaked to the skin, stood impassively
against a wall, singing hymns of love."

Before he left the country in 1973,
soldier's burned Littin's books in a bonfire constructed in the garden of his
home. Over a decade later, in 1986, Pinochet was still burning books. The
dictator himself ordered 15,000 copies of Clandestine in Chile to be
destroyed.

On September 11, 2010, over six thousand people gathered to mark the
anniversary of the coup. Participants converged in homage to the victims of the
dictatorship, as well as to demand justice and respect for human rights under
the current Sebastian Pinera administration. Chile's right wing President Pinera, one of the wealthiest
people in the country, did not participate in the acts that commemorated the
start of the dictatorship.

"We are living under a right wing regime
which participated in the dictatorship and even today is justifying the
[dictatorship's] human rights violations," Mireya Garcia, the vice president of
the Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared, told Telesur.

Some members of Pinera's administration also
worked in the Pinochet dictatorship and have not been brought to justice for
their crimes. Speaking of the 37th anniversary of the September 11th coup,
Pinera said that Chileans should move beyond the conflicts of the past. "We
should not remain trapped in the same fights and divisions."

Allende warned against the tyranny of
forgetting. In his final radio broadcast to the Chilean people, the president
condemned the coup plotters, "I say to them that I am certain that the seeds
which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of
Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to
dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force.
History is ours, and people make history."