Chile Archives - Not Even Past

José and His Brothers

Pampa Unión, today, is a ghost town lost in the Atacama Desert, a mile high and halfway between the Chilean mining centers of Antofagasta and Calama. Founded over a century ago as a medical way station, it quickly became a resting place for nitrate miners on their days off, complete with all the supplies and entertainments that working men required. With two main streets and just one tree, the 2,000 stable inhabitants entertained a floating population of up to 15,000. The town was abandoned in 1954. All that is left today are the ruins of adobe walls with broken bits of signage and a cemetery.

Diego was the one with the artistic inspiration. They were humble ideas, at the beginning, but he took them seriously. He could move heaven and earth to make something out of whatever it was he had in his head.

So, he went up to the pampa with fifteen classmates and a couple of movie cameras, the best they could get their hands on. It was quite the production. For Pampa Unión. The idea was a short feature about a young man who goes there to meet his ghosts, the hidden history of his rootless family, buried in the toxic sands of an abandoned mining town.

Pampa Union — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons)

They even had a visit from Diego’s baby sister. She couldn’t stay, of course, but she went for the day. They dressed her like a doll from the nineteenth century and they filmed her with flowers in her hand wandering around among the tombstones. It was traumatic for her, because some of the graves had been disturbed. For art’s sake. The point was that suffering ran deep in Chilean veins. We were a nation of exiles, slaves, and survivors. Or something like that. It would be disconcerting to be from a ghost town, I guess.

The boys went up there to rough it, but they also went to have a good time. The desert is enchanting. It has a magic that wakes up all your neurons. When you are from the city, the purity of color, light, and shadow connects your soul with the depths of life and death, past and present. I drove up to see them, about the fifth day of their odyssey. They said, whatever else I brought, to please bring water. They were running out.

A mausoleum that exhibits years of decay — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons.)

There was a scene with a hot-air balloon. The protagonist needed to send a message, an urgent, desperate call for help. Like when someone lost at sea might send a message in a bottle, but airmail. As if everyone just had a hot-air balloon stashed in their billfold for emergencies. As if wind-born balloons ever made it to their intended addressees. The story didn’t have to be realistic, comrade, just visually pleasing.

Hot-air balloons were a thing, right about then, in the artistic community of Santiago. The dictatorship had been over for almost a decade, and even Plaza Ñuñoa had become a center for a new species of night life that posed as politically aware. Starving artists, the kind Neruda called, anarcocapitalistas, would show up with marionettes, walking on stilts or pointlessly lifting off hot-air balloons, in exchange for pocket change from passers-by, and demanding that a Ministry of Culture be created to fund the fog of marijuana smoke in which they floated. Diego got his hands on three hot-air balloons, bright red and white, and he took them up to Pampa Unión.

All three had to look the same, so that his team could film the scene three times from different angles and create the illusion of just one balloon. And they had to film at dawn, because that was the only time of day that the wind wouldn’t abduct their temperamental prop and send it tumbling sideways across the desert. There were about fifteen minutes of quiet just as the sun came up. After that, the wind began to swirl around like the noxious gas on the surface of Jupiter until the sun went down.

Two men stand between two walls. The walls have faded painted advertisements — Photo via the author.

It was the first time that all fifteen of them had ever gotten up that early. Some had hardly slept. To buffer the dopamine, they drank at night. Not a good idea, not in that climate. Alcohol dehydrates you. But it was tradition. Sebastián, nicknamed el Perro, would crawl out of his sleeping bag, muttering, If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I will never drink again. It was like the folksong from Carnaval in Bolivia, the one that says, they were nice boys, but they just couldn’t stop drinking.

The scene with the hot-air balloons was a success. They spent the rest of the day in the cemetery, where they got to know the whole town: names, nationalities, dates of birth and death. People died young. There were cemetery ghettos of Croatians, English, Mapuche, and even Chinese. I brought their dirty clothes home to wash. Imagine, fifteen twenty-year-olds, no showers, drinking at night and filming in the cemetery during the day. They reeked of sand, sweat, alcohol, and cadaver.

José and his brother, Francisco, went with me. They weren’t from Santiago. They were from Antofagasta. Well, they weren’t from Antofagasta, either, comrade. Their father and grandfather had grown up on the pampa. They were desert people from way back.

Walking around in the ruins, it was easy to figure out which was the street with the hardware stores, and which one had been for cantinas and bordellos. Most of the roofs had fallen in, but there were still signs painted on the walls of the once-thriving businesses. And there was junk on the ground. Kitchen middens of the future, an archeologist’s dream that we were disturbing. There were spoons and saucers, most of them bent or broken. There were wine bottles, shattered with the cork still in. There were tin plates, costume jewels, bits of clothing and other residue of a forgotten humanity from almost a century ago.

Two men stand between two walls — Photo via the author.

Among all the junk, we found some bent pieces of tin, one shaped into a star, another that looked like a ship, and one that was shaped like a child. The boys from Santiago, smart as they were, had no explanation. José picked one up, as if to examine it in the light, the very bright desert light, and he said, this is a toy. My grandfather used to make these. A loaded silence of amazement descended over the boys from Santiago. José had given himself away. He had revealed his roots and the endless desert sand into which they sank, publicly claiming the pampa as his own. For him, this was no short feature film. For him, la pampa was the real thing.

Though the original population in Pampa Unión had been inordinately skewed toward masculinity, there were females. Children were born. Sometimes, they survived the diarrhea and the diphtheria. They got old enough to need something to play with.

Supplies came up from down below. There was wine and aguardiente. There was beef, kept on the hoof, as there was no refrigeration. There were satin dresses for the prostitutes and Victrola Talking Machines to create a romantic ambiance for fantasy love affairs. But it never occurred to anyone to send up a doll, a stuffed bear, or a toy truck.

So, grandparents would take their tin shears—they had those—and try to make something nice to stimulate the imagination of the toddlers who had never known anything other than the infinite horizon, the blinding clarity of midday and the starlit dark of night. In la pampa, grandparents were often no older than about thirty-five. Anyone who lived to be forty got the hell out of there.

In Antofagasta, José’s grandfather kept making toys out of empty tin cans. A long time ago, few toys made it there, either. No toys, no fruit and no conjugated verbs. People with money took trips to Santiago if they wanted something nice. Poor children did without. Raising children was not the objective, there. You had to get the ore out of the ground. You had to get it down the mountain, onto ships, into trains and out of there. That was all. Playful little brats were slag, byproducts of some miner’s love affair on his day off.

Even so, grandfathers found tender spots for toddlers and got busy with their tin shears. Compared to X–boxes, the tin-can toys might have seemed like nothing at all. But, compared to nothing at all, comrade, well, that was another story. They were the first thing that delighted the eye of virgin innocence. For the semi-abandoned babies of the desert, tiny tin toys were shining treasures, an opportunity to imagine the garbage dump where they lived transformed into burgeoning beauty. They were a chance, maybe their only chance, to ever contemplate the world as it might have once been, as it could someday become. Those toys did tend to have sharp edges and pointy places. They were dangerous toys that prepared children for life in the Norte Grande, a life with lots of rough edges.

The guys from Santiago grew quiet. José’s revelation gave them pause. They realized the deficiencies of their own elitist upbringing. José became silent, too. He understood, in that moment, the cultural and geographical abyss that separated him from the sons of wealth, privilege, and power. He had played with those toys. Francisco had, too.

More From Nathan Stone:

Three-year-olds on the world stage

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Miss O’Keeffe

For further reading, see Hernán Rivera Letelier’s novel about Pampa Unión, Fatamorgana de amor con banda de música. (Santiago: Planeta, 1998)

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

By Nathan Stone

Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad.
Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar.

A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom.
Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are the sea.

Charo Cofré

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago. The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite. Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers. Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market. The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo. It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile (via wikimedia)

Old town Santiago sat atop an ancient network of canals. Some were small but others were regular aqueducts, lined with stone and brick. Built for irrigation, they carried quantities of water from Canal San Carlos to the Mapocho River. Before there was pavement. When Matucana and Avenida Matta were still just vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Back when every home had tomatoes, basil, and cilantro growing out back.

The central region of Chile is still crisscrossed with canals that were built by a dozen Jesuit missionaries and several thousand local Indians. The intention was to strengthen the native communities against European invasion. Taking advantage of the melting snowpack in the mountains, they transformed a semi-arid wasteland into the now-famous fertile green valleys.

The effect on the indigenous population was the opposite of what had been intended. In 1550, the conquistadors said that Nueva Extramadura was too poor and not worth the trouble. By 1750, they had changed their conquering minds. Irrigated and green, the Spanish liked it. So, they threw out the Indians and the Jesuits, and they set up their haciendas.

One hundred and fifty-three “nice families” colonized with all the rapacious vigor of their prestigious lineages. They were Spaniards, Basques, and some French. They brought their cattle and their vineyards. They brought their illusions of noble breeding and Chile criollo was born.

Their descendants became the barrio alto, the GCU, as they say, Gente Como Uno, (People Like Us), a code that only legitimate members of their tightly-closed circle were supposed to recognize. It wasn’t about money, comrade, though the GCU did tend to be rich. It wasn’t about land, either, though they controlled most of it. The GCU sustained an Old World fantasy of hereditary aristocracy. They really believed it, and they insisted on marrying their children to each other. A rich man without a pedigree was called, roto con plata, more or less, a bum with lots of cash. If he had not descended from the legendary hundred families (who were, in reality, one hundred and fifty-three), he was and always would be an outsider.

The canals in the central valleys are still functional. They are the reason why there is Chilean wine and fruit at Whole Foods. Building a canal is no joke. It has to always go downhill so that the water flows forward and never backs up. In 1600, that was an engineering masterpiece.

As the population grew in old town Santiago, the canals lost their reason for being. Family gardens became parking lots and chicken coops became bus stops. They are mostly dry today, an underground labyrinth for which there is no known map. Only the rats know their way around.

But, until the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, the water continued to flow, and there was access at strategic places. Neighbors would draw a bucket or two to water a shade tree, or to dampen the streets and vacant lots in the summer. That kept the dust down as boys upheld an important tradition, the continuous game of pick-up soccer, la pichanga. No shirts, no shoes, no score, house rules. Everyone played until it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face. As the brown water flowed constantly down into the rocky Mapocho.

Flowing water was an urban temptation. Children learned early in life to toss all their trash into the open mouths of Santiago’s filthy underside. The subterranean monster swallowed everything, without complaining. What’s more, most homes still had no indoor plumbing. The canal was where people dumped their chamber pots. Anyone who drew a bucketful had to watch out for floaters from upstream. That was emblematic of the ongoing relationship between the barrio alto and los de abajo, the people down below. It just seemed natural that those in high places would dump their refuse on those who were geographically and socially below them. That was also the reason why typhoid and hepatitis were so common, down there.

La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo) (via wikipedia)

There was an opening in the schoolyard at Andacollo. It was about two feet wide and three feet long, rimmed with discarded railroad ties. The canal water rushed by about a foot below the ground level. Like everywhere else, at Andacollo, the canal water was used to keep the dust down and get rid of the trash. There was a big willow tree in the middle of the schoolyard that provided shade on hot afternoons. The groundskeeper would make a trench around it with his trowel, and fill it with water from the canal, using his big iron bucket.

The school was all boys back then, and la pichanga never stopped. One day, the ball bounced close to the opening. As tradition demanded, the boy closest ran backwards with reckless abandon, to make the save. It’s a passion, comrade. When the ball was in play, nothing else mattered. He fell into the canal and disappeared.

The foul waters dragged him through their labyrinth. No rescue was possible; nothing anyone could do. They found him the next day in the Mapocho River. His clothes had been ripped off. His body was twisted and broken, but he was recognizable. He had been dragged through hell in an unexpected, surprising, and unavoidable way. I don’t know his name.

Back then, it never occurred to anyone to cover a hole in a schoolyard because someone might fall in. They told the boys to be careful. That was part of their education. They had to learn that any one of them could drop into the abyss at any moment.

That awful day, the dead boy’s classmates learned that destiny could betray you; that there were tragic, violent accidents; that the lives of poor boys didn’t really matter; that in five seconds, it could all be over and done with; that they, too, could disappear and be forgotten. That day, the boys learned that you have to be clever to survive in a cruel world.

Nowadays, we cover holes like that. We deceive our children with the illusion that the world is safe and trustworthy. That has never been true, but if you are under thirty, you were probably brought up to believe it and expect it.

The fickle nature of fate is the elephant in our proverbial living room. Everyone pretends it isn’t there. And the willow tree, silent witness to everything, grows tall.

The national anthem says that Chile is the copia feliz del Edén. That means a happy copy of paradise. But it’s just a copy, not the real thing. And Eden was a tricky place, comrade. You do remember what happened there?

You May Also Enjoy:

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

Civil War and Early Life: Snapshots of Early War in Guatemala by Vasken Markarian

The Battle of Chile

by Nathan Stone

“Where is that terrible beauty we planted so long ago?”

-Santiago del Nuevo Extremo

Rodolfo Müller is almost a hundred years old, now. He still lives in the same house as always, off Simón Bolivar, between Hamburgo and Coventry. That’s in Ñuñoa, a township on the near west side of Santiago. It’s a big house, and very nice but unpretentious. If he had wanted, he could have picked a more prestigious address further north, in Providencia, or up higher, in Las Condes. But he didn’t.

Rodolfo was born in Germany in about 1920. Before World War II, he came to Chile with his parents and his brother. They were just teenagers. I met him when he was almost sixty. He still looked very German after all those years: tall, blond, and blue-eyed. But he was a Jew. That’s what people said, anyway. Maybe, just on his mother’s side. They came to Chile to escape from Hitler. They left in time and made new lives in South America.

Rodolfo was a violinist and a pretty good one, apparently. Until he lost a segment of his little finger in an accident. If it had been his right hand, it wouldn’t have mattered as much, not for the violin. But it was the left. Violinists use that a lot. Rodolfo was a mechanic. It was a work-related accident. Machines are cold-hearted and unforgiving in that way.

He drove a ’64 Volvo. It was old, even then, but it ran like a Swiss watch. He did all the work on it personally. Rodolfo was not the mechanic at the shop on the corner. He was the ace; the mechanical surgeon. A horse-tamer for steel and steam. When big industrial contraptions at local factories broke down, they came and got Rodolfo. He understood machines.

When he gave up the violin, Rodolfo started playing the accordion. You can’t have music from Chiloé without an accordion. Besides, after Beethoven’s quartets, the melodies from Chiloé were simple, comrade. He played in a group was called Aydar. His wife, Irma Silva, was the director.

Jorge Müller shooting for the film The Battle of Chile — Jorge Müller shooting for the film *The Battle of Chile* (via Patricio Guzmán)

Chiloé is an island in the south. Potatoes, sheep, and seafood. Theirs was a picturesque culture and they had a music all their own. Aydar comes from the local vocabulary. It’s a contraction of ayudar, to help. Solidarity is fundamental for survival in a place like that. It was primitive island communism. It’s just how it was.

Irma and Rodolfo were members of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos). Aydar was not the official group of the Association. There was one. But this was Irma’s project, where Inelia sang and danced the cueca with Lucho from Lo Hermida. It’s where I met Pepe and Alfredo, Victor and Jaqueline, Sonia and the unforgettable Miguel Marín. I played guitar and sang backup vocals. I could do harmony. People liked that. Everyone there had been hurt by the Pinochet regime in one way or another. It was our protest group. They couldn’t kill the joy.

Irma was a professional folklorist. She even taught folklore at the University, before the coup. After the coup, folklore was considered suspicious. Too many leftists.

Irma and Rodolfo were the parents of Jorge Müller, the filmmaker. He disappeared on November 29, 1974, along with his girlfriend, the actress and producer, Carmen Bueno. Inelia’s boy, Tito, had been gone four months by then. Miguel Angel, Doris Meniconi’s boy, just ten days.

Jorge Müller and Carmen Bueno were clandestine members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, also known as MIR. Before the coup, they had worked for Chile Films. With director Patricio Guzmán, they made the documentary, La batalla de Chile –The Battle of Chile. It was about the historical process in Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. It was meant to be a memoir of the revolution, but it devolved into a denunciation of the coup. Jorge was the cameraman. The whole world can now see the coup unfolding through his eyes.

Jorge Müller and Patricio Guzmán (via Patricio Guzmán)

Now, if MIR wanted a documentary about the Popular Unity government, it wasn’t to come out in support of the idea that the ballot box was the right way to have a revolution, comrade. MIR wasn’t a part of the Popular Unity coalition. They believed in violent overthrow or nothing at all. The theory was that if you tried to take over the means of production nicely, there will be a coup. They were right about that. But Chile Films was more than just MIR, and documentaries are more than just propaganda. In the long run, The Battle of Chile got out of control. Now, it’s a classic.

The unedited footage was smuggled out after the coup. That cost Jorge his life. Irma was inconsolable. She was a high society lady, deep down. She liked things done properly, efficiently and on time. She joined the Association when Jorge disappeared. Later, she created Aydar.

Folklore from Chiloé was raucous, sentimental, and fun. Someone would speak briefly, at the beginning of our presentations, to say who we were and why we were there. Then, it was strictly repertoire from Chiloé. Some of the songs talked about lovers lost at sea, or travelers who never came home, but the listeners had to make the connection themselves. It was a challenge to the regime, but an indirect one. A clever one.

Among the mothers in the Association, Irma was one of the youngest. She died of cancer in ’94. Pinochet was no longer in power, but there was still no news of Jorge. Rodolfo was left alone. A grandson went to live with him. And there are many friends from the old days. He hasn’t been forgotten. His son was an artist. One of the best Chile has ever known. But there can be no poets in Plato’s Republic, comrade. As it turns out, the real battle of Chile was one that we would lose. The whole project of a world that is fair, just, and free has collapsed.

The Battle of Chile movie poster (via Patricio Guzmán)

They started filming in May of ’72. The tale had begun, but no one knew how it would end. Víctor Jara had a song about that, from before. After the coup, Santiago del Nuevo Extremo gave us the verse, where is that terrible beauty we planted, so long ago? Nostalgia, comrade.

The revolution failed, but the film is still a treasure. It has its rightful place today in the shantytowns of poor Chilean youth, the ones who never knew that once there had been a dream.

Irma and Rodolfo had a house on the coast, at El Quisco. That was a beautiful beach and, in its heyday, pretty elegant. Now, it has sort of come down in the world. People with money don’t go there anymore. They prefer Algarrobo, Papudo and Zapallar. Not because the beaches are any better, only because the crowd is more exclusive.

Irma and Rodolfo’s house was up on a cliff, right near the shore. It was a wooden house, red and white, with a huge pine tree in the front. The beach was about five hundred feet away, but to get there, you had to take the stairs. It was about two-hundred feet down. Which was why the view from the back porch was so spectacular. There was a well that never went dry. In a coastal town with a chronic water shortage, Irma and Rodolfo’s house was the oasis.

Deep down, Jorge liked the good life. Given a choice between a political demonstration downtown and a day at the beach with his friends, he preferred the day at the beach. El Quisco was his beach. I bought that house in 1987. Irma and Rodolfo sold it because they needed the money and because they weren’t going very often anymore. It was hard, because it was Jorge’s house, too. It was as if his footsteps could still be heard there. As if his heart were still beating there. Something about the smell. When I went, which was quite often, it was as if I dreamed his dreams and saw his visions. Irma and Rodolfo wanted the house to stay in the family. It was a simple place, but enchanting.

Aydar performed from ’76 until ’88, more or less. Those were glorious years, tragic and triumphant. Irma and Rodolfo had another child, a daughter, but Jorge was their pride and joy. And they were right to be proud. Repressive government doesn’t work out when people can see the truth.

The DINA took Jorge Müller and Carmen Bueno at 9:30 am on the corner of Bilbao and Los Leones. They had been to a party with the cast and crew of another film that had opened the night before at Cine Las Condes. They were on their way to work at Chile Films, but they never made it there. Agents appeared in civilian clothing, driving a grey Chevrolet pick-up. We have seen them before. They tried to rip out the people’s eyes and ears, comrade, but we still have the film. That’s not ever going away.

Perhaps, Jorge and Carmen died believing that victory was imminent. That’s what MIR had taught them. Song, poetry and cinema are more powerful than bombs and bullets. Maybe they are, but sometimes, they are not powerful enough.

For more on Chile’s disappeared ones, see www.memoriaviva.com.

La Batalla de Chile is available on Youtube, linked here is part one of four.

Also by Nathan Stone on Not Even Past:

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An Unusual Disappearance

You may also like:

Monica Jimenez reviews Remembering Pinochet’s Chile
Jimena Perry on memory and violence in Colombia
Elizabeth O’Brien reviews Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1970

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An unusual disappearance

by Nathan Stone

They weren’t all the same. We know of at least one soldier who had a conscience. There were several, actually. Most were weighty figures, captains and colonels who refused to follow orders. Some of them quit or went into exile. Others died. But I’m talking about conscripts, the powerless boys who were in military service when the decision was made to interrupt the institutional process of the Chilean state on September 11, 1973. When the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the US-backed Chilean military. When those boys were commanded to arrest, torture, and kill their own brothers and sisters.

Rodolfo González was one such conscript. He was proud that he had been chosen for the Air Force. He was just eighteen. After the coup, he was commissioned to serve at the DINA, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional. That was General Pinochet’s secret police.

Rodolfo wasn’t an agent, but he did participate. He had guard duty. He delivered messages. He got coffee for the boss when the boss got tired of torturing someone.

He lived with his aunt, María González. I knew her. She was a member of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos) until the day she died. She marched alongside Doris, Inelia, and the mothers of so many others who had disappeared, carrying her placard with the picture of Rodolfo. María González was an anomaly. Rodolfo was unusual company for the other prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, too.

Demonstration by members of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Photographer: Kena Lorenzini, via Wikimedia Commons)

María González said that, when her nephew started out at the DINA, he stopped wearing a uniform. They gave him a dark suit and black shoes. They picked him up in a car every day, a black Chevrolet Impala with tinted windows. Once, Rodolfo showed his military ID to his aunt. It identified him as a member of the DINA. That was a violation of protocol. The first one.

During the dictatorship, showing military ID was understood as a threat. It was a way to cut in line and get preferential treatment. But the DINA was different. You weren’t supposed to show that one anywhere, except at the door. They had several doors, actually, all of them, secret.

Rodolfo Valentín didn’t do well at the DINA. His own humanity betrayed him. Some days, he was sent to guard prisoners with bullet wounds, internal injuries, and broken bones at the Military Hospital. He would use his privileged access to tell to the prisoners what their respective situations were. Later, he contacted some family members, letting them know where their loved ones were and in what condition.

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez (via Memoria Viva)

Maybe he wasn’t so clever. Maybe Rodolfo really thought that was how it was done. That was, after all, the Chilean way. But not in the DINA. One would think he had been thoroughly briefed. My suspicion is that our Rodolfo Valentín was very clever. If so, he was in open rebellion.

I don’t know if he really thought he had a chance of not getting caught. Maybe, like many others, he believed the military government would be over soon. Or, maybe, he was just very brave. Rodolfo was already a witness to the wildness of the DINA. If he wasn’t on board, then he was dangerous. The day would come when he would speak out.

He had an older brother who was a leftist militant. He had been given temporary asylum at the Argentine embassy.

Rodolfo was the third of ten. He had lived with his aunt since he was small. His father had died in ’64, leaving his mother more mouths than she could feed. His aunt had raised him to lighten the load. But someone had taught him very young that there are things one would never do to another human being. Perhaps that was his father.

He fell in step with the DINA at the beginning. Afraid, perhaps, or just following orders, as they say. And, maybe, he missed his father. That would leave any boy vulnerable to the military style. And maybe he was the favorite recruit of someone important. Military hierarchy works that way, believe it or not. And it just might be true that Rodolfo was momentarily tempted by the unlimited power of the DINA. It was naked, corrupt, clandestine, total power.

One thing we know for certain. His parents loved the cinema. That’s how he got the name Rodolfo Valentín. Perhaps, they were romantics, fans of Gardel, the tango singer. The cosmopolitan night life of Santiago in the ‘50’s ended, for them, abruptly. A heart attack, or an accident; I’m not sure. Rodolfo was ten when he went to live with his aunt.

The DINA caught him, of course. Communicating with the incomunicados. The next day, he was one of them. They took him from aunt’s home on the night of July 23, 1974. He could have met Inelia’s boy, Héctor, first as a DINA man, with infinite power over him, and, a few days later, as a comrade in the anonymous darkness at Villa Grimaldi.

During the Popular Unity years, Luz Arce had belonged to the Socialist Party. She was taken in June 1974. Rodolfo was her guard at the Military Hospital. He became too friendly. He even asked for her advice about how to get his brother out of the country.

Then, Luz Arce defected to the enemy. First, she became an informant and, later, a full-blown DINA agent. Stockholm Syndrome, that’s what they called it. When someone who is abducted begins to collaborate with their abductors. It’s what happened to Patty Hearst.

In 1990, when military rule was over, Luz Arce recanted. She told everything she knew to the Rettig Commission. She said she saw Rodolfo at Villa Grimaldi. He had his leg in a cast. Out of desperation, he had thrown himself from the tower. Maybe he thought he could escape, but no one ever escaped from the DINA.

They might have thrown him from the tower. The DINA agents were especially cruel with Rodolfo. For them, he was a traitor. Because of his brother, they figured he was a leftist infiltrator.

That wasn’t true. The other prisoners even said he was different. He had no political background. Leftist parties had training. Militants knew the drill. They knew what to expect when they were tortured. Rodolfo, they said, was “like a virgin.” An inexperienced, innocent boy.

Luz Arce said that the last time she saw Rodolfo alive, he was stripped naked and hanging from a beam at Villa Grimaldi. We don’t know if he was hanging by his hands, by his feet, or in some unimaginably painful stress position, barely breathing and wishing he could stop.

In 1977, two Air Force officials showed up at his aunt’s apartment in Santiago to confiscate Rodolfo’s military insignia. It seems they made a special effort to make sure that he never reappeared. Or maybe they did it just to be cruel. Why they waited so long was a mystery.

If all children had someone to teach them right from wrong; someone who would say that sometimes the authorities are evil; that power and goodness are not the same thing; then there would be no DINA, no CIA black ops, no My Lai massacres. There would be no cruelty, no abduction and no torture. I am surprised that there were so few like Rodolfo. Sometimes, in this world, there seem to be more cowards than heroes, more darkness than light. It doesn’t have to be that way.

There were nearly 2,000 who disappeared in Chile between 1974 and 1976. Most of them were convinced of an ideology. They had chosen to sacrifice their lives for the dream of a better world. But Rodolfo’s option was more primitive. He decided that he could not become a torturer, even if it meant he would be tortured. He chose solidarity, and it cost him everything he had.

For more on Chile’s disappeared ones, see www.memoriaviva.com.

Nathan Stone is a new graduate student in Latin American History. He lived in Chile for many years, starting in 1979.

You may also like:

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973, by Heidi Tinsman

by Elizabeth O’Brien

In this gendered labor history, Heidi Tinsman looks at the lives of rural agrarian workers under Salvador Allende’s socialist revolutionary government. She examines women’s participation in — and exclusion from — agrarian production and reform in Chile. Tinsman makes a major contribution by showing that the marginalization of women affected the success of Allende’s efforts to expropriate land and create worker-run agrarian cooperatives.

Drawing on a wealth of oral testimonies and legal sources, Tinsman shows how agricultural workers lived under the highly exploitative systems of inquilino and obligado labor in the years before Allende came to power. The author then chronicles the Christian Democratic regime’s initiation of agrarian reform in 1964. The Christian Democrats sought to modernize industry, punish abusive patrons, unionize laborers, and raise the rural standard of living. As a result the number of unionized workers rose from 2,000 in 1964 to a quarter of a million by 1972. The reformists were not revolutionary, however, and although they encouraged workers to resist landowners, the Christian Democrats did not challenge state authority.

After his election in 1970, Allende called for the complete destruction of latifundia. He quickly doubled the amount of expropriated land and converted it into communally run plots, known as asentamientos, which incorporated approximately 20,000 Chilean families. Although still operating hierarchically, asentados (the workers in charge of asentamientos) paid workers more fairly than patróns and made collective decisions about production and construction. Only men were allowed to serve as asentados, however, which excluded wives (who were seen as dependents) and single women who allegedly lacked the requisite experience.

*Salvador Allende and his government, 1970. Source: Wikimedia Commons*.

The impact of agrarian reform on women was mixed. For example, the Unidad Popular (Allende’s party, the UP) did not respond to feminist calls to reassess domestic divisions of labor that restricted women’s ability to participate in working communal plots. Nonetheless, women assumed new levels of political activism: they participated in land tomas (takeovers), successfully demanded housing reform, and coordinated community soup kitchens. Women’s Committees (CEMAs) flourished, union membership skyrocketed, infant mortality dropped by 60%, and illiteracy was halved.

Mujer avanza con la bandera dela patria” (“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland”) (1970). la Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), Chile. Courtesy of Centro de Documentación Salvador Allende. — *“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland”: a poster supporting* La Unidad Popular, 1970. *Source: Centro de Documentación Salvador Allende.*

Historians traditionally depict rural women as conservative, religious, and opposed to political change. Tinsman shows that in Allende’s Chile this was not the case. Women in Aconcagua, for example, were not particularly religious and rural female support of the UP grew stronger as land expropriation accelerated. To investigate how women experienced the reform, Tinsman explores on-the-ground issues that produced social polarization in rural Chile. Some campesinos, for example, opposed expropriation and defended the bosses, which at times provoked bloodshed. Problems also arose when husbands excluded their wives from politics and took advantage of their political positions in order to take mistresses. To make matters worse, rural food distribution was politicized, and UP supporters often received more rations. Amidst the political and social turmoil, charges of wife beating tripled in comparison to the Christian Democrat years, and rape charges increased as well. Although Tinsman interprets these figures at face value, they are not clear indicators of increases in abuse, because, under the UP, women might have felt more empowered and thus filed more charges.

While Allende’s approach to women and gender was more radical, egalitarian, and feminist than the Christian Democrats who preceded him, Tinsman shows that men were still the “central subjects and main protagonists” of agrarian reform, while women experienced “sexually inscribed vulnerability within the process of political struggle.” Women worried about the effects of social upheaval on their families, which was sadly ironic because “the family continued to be central to female survival and still loudly touted by the UP as the foundation of social uplift.”

Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

by Elizabeth O’Brien

Gender was central to nation-state formation and working-class politics under the Popular Front governments that ruled Chile between 1938 and 1952, preceding Salvador Allende’s socialist regime (1970-1973). The Popular Front sought to industrialize the economy, create an educated and compliant working class, construct a modern welfare state, and solidify the nuclear family as the base of a unified nation.

The Popular Fronts struck compromises between the national leaders and the growing socialist and communist movements in Chile. One of Karin Rosemblatt’s main contributions is to show that the Popular Front enjoyed the support of various subaltern groups such as the National Labor Confederation (CTCh) and, initially, the feminist group Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh). Focusing on political structures and elite ideology, she analyzes the politics of gender in state policy, and leftist and feminist struggle. The author’s use of oral histories as well as government archival sources helps her paint a complex historical narrative that shows that political and ideological diversity strengthened the Popular Front coalition instead of weakening it.

State officials and employers sought to transform working class men into disciplined and economically stable husbands. With the support of CTCh, they passed the Family Wage Act in 1952, which paid married men more than single workers and reinforced male authority in the family by institutionalizing the notion that men should be primary breadwinners. But in some industries such as mining, employers discriminated against married workers to avoid increasing their pay, and this often prompted married men to claim their status as single. She also shows that although base wages rose overall in masculinized fields like mining, construction, and transportation, they stagnated in the female-dominated realms of hotel service, domestic work, and sewing factories. Feminists in MEMCh called for equal pay between genders and denounced the Family Wage Act, claiming that it excluded women from workforce. Nevertheless, most working-class women supported the family wage system, and National Labor Confederation pamphlets promoted the idea that women belonged in the home.

Rosemblatt traces other conflicts between Communists, progressive feminists, and MEMCHistas, some of whom were politically conservative. MEMCh began in close affiliation with the Communist Party, but many men in the Party rejected the feminists as snobbish and disruptive. Despite a lack of support from the Communist Party, MEMCh succeeded in organizing 58 grassroots committees that lobbied for mothers’ centers, education, healthcare, housing, state funded daycares, increased access to birth control, reform of marriage laws that subordinated women, and legalization of divorce.

As the political climate turned rightward under President Gónzalez Videla (1946-1952), MEMCh did as well. Rosemblatt shows that moderate feminists used close alliances with the state to wrest control of women’s committees from Communists and radicals, and that conservative feminists even helped to suppress Communist organizing among housewives and common women. Cross-class feminist organizing strengthened and promoted the compromise state and the bourgeois-democratic alliance, but feminist success was limited due to the popularity of normative gender ideologies (even on the Left), and feminists’ failure to win over the working class.

Workers march in support of Allende in 1964

Leftists, like the state, wanted to regulate working class life and re-define normative masculinity, but they pursued a socialist brand of discipline and morality. By examining leftist publications and oral histories, Rosemblatt shows that moral prescriptions unified the left and defined its boundaries. Socialists did not place much emphasis on virginity and honor: instead, they valued restraint, morality, and class unity. Although their parents often disagreed, Communist youth therefore felt that they did not have to wait for marriage to have sex. Socialist masculine norms focused on abstention from alcohol and marital fidelity, although many labor leaders engaged in adulterous affairs. Although socialists claimed that an alternative economic system would eliminate patriarchy, Rosemblatt concludes that leftist organizations ultimately reinscribed class and gender hierarchies. Furthermore, socialists and feminists alike appropriated and abrogated working class women’s struggles.

The Popular Front governments gave rise to important social debates about patriarchy and capitalism in modern Chile, and set the stage for Salvador Allende’s peaceful socialist revolution. None of these mid-twentieth century regimes were able to institutionalize gender equality. However, they were certainly preferable to the brutal military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came into power after the 1973 U.S.-supported coup on Allende’s democratically elected government and enacted widespread human rights abuses during his seventeen-year rule (1973-1990).

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment, by Daniela Bleichmar (2012)

by Christina Marie Villarreal

The European Enlightenment occurred as an ongoing dialogue of ideas—a discourse composed of voices from around the globe. As Daniela Bleichmar demonstrates, southern Europe, long ignored in scholarship on the Enlightenment, had a crucial voice in the conversation.

In Visible Empires, Bleichmar claims that Imperial Spain, more than any other contemporary empire, used visual documents like paintings and maps to make the empire tangible and, in this way, “governable.” Images, she argues, made visible the hidden or secret. Bleichmar highlights the Hispanic World’s investment in knowledge production at the peripheries of empire. She emphasizes how scientific investigations, specifically botanist and natural history expeditions, fit into the Spanish Empire’s attempt to reestablish itself as a European political and economic power in the late eighteenth century. Her findings demonstrate how relationships between the center and periphery of empire were often a matter of perspective.

Bleichmar makes use of the long ignored and beautiful visual archive of botanical paintings produced by Spanish expeditions around the Atlantic. She reads these centuries-old detailed depictions of flora and fauna to stress the relevance of vision to governing of the empire. For Spain, these illustrations provided visual evidence of worlds across the sea and of our ability to understand nature. They buttressed Spain’s ownership of the unseen. The Spanish metropole also used this method to understand the racial compositions of distant populations. New Spain’s casta paintings and Peru’s taxonomical illustrations gave the metropole a window into their kingdoms abroad. Simultaneously, the project supplied the peripheries of empire with the agency to codify their populations. While knowledge of its far-off inhabitants gave the metropole a sense of discovery and ownership, the power to produce pictures of their world gave people on the periphery power of their own.

An image from "Flora Huayaquilensis," a visual collection of South America's plants as seen by Spanish botanist Juan José Tafalla during a 1785 expedition through Peru and Chile. ([Juan Tafalla], “Flora Huayaquilensis,” ourheritage.ac.nz | OUR Heritage - See more at: http://otago.ourheritage.ac.nz/items/show/7696#sthash.r8R9WHhx.dpuf)

An image from “Flora Huayaquilensis,” a visual collection of South America’s plants seen by Spanish botanist Juan José Tafalla during a 1785 expedition through Peru and Chile. ([Juan Tafalla], “Flora Huayaquilensis,” ourheritage.ac.nz | OUR Heritage)

During the Enlightenment, intellectuals and others contested and refined the themes of art, science, and knowledge using visual representations. The “correct” representation did not always come from the center or metropole but, as Bleichmar explains, it was often difficult to tell where in the empire botanical Enlightenment projects began. Indeed, knowledge moved in multiple directions. Bleichmar explores how some naturalists understood colonial agendas in ways that differed from the intentions of the Spanish metropole. Consider Basco y Vargas’ pepper initiative in the Philippines. He prioritized his local economic goals over the philosophical inquiries coming from Spain. In this case, the periphery directed knowledge production as Basco y Vargas determined what botanical investigation to support.

Allegiances and relationships to a “center” thus differed depending on local context. However, by suggesting “the goal of this intensive natural history investigation… was nothing less than to rediscover and reconquer the empire at a time of intense crisis,” Bleichmar seems to suggest that Spain held more control over the direction of knowledge production. In addition, the author admits that the only a limited audience saw or studied the visual illustrations produced by enlightenment botanist. These minor inconsistencies leave the reader with a lingering question: to what extent did “visual” knowledge shape the empire at large?

Botanical drawing from “Flora Huayaquilensis” (Pinterest/Carlos Adanero)

Aside from images, Bleichmar also examines the tremendous written archive that preserves the voices of botanist and economists. While historians typically use images in their work without fully exploring the significance they held for their creators, the author’s examination of written sources provides the reader with a fuller understanding of the botanical illustrations. Paired with Bleichmar’s engaging prose, Visible Empires constitutes a thorough interpretation of southern European Enlightenment and provides a fine example of a historical investigation achieved with beautiful visual sources.

More books on Early Modern science:

Jorge Cañizares Esguerra’s review of Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination

Laurie Wood’s review of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe

Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 by Steven Stern (2006)

by Monica Jimenez

Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 is the first book in Steve J. Stern’s trilogy entitled The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. Stern’s trilogy studies the ways that Chileans have struggled to understand the collective trauma of the 1973 military coup and the repressive regime that resulted from it. In his introduction to the trilogy Stern explains that he imagines this process as a ‘memory box’ that contains the community’s conflicting memories and lore, of various kinds, seeking to make sense of this crucial experience The memory box is not hidden away but is vividly present and foundational to the community; people are drawn to it and to engaging with it. This is a beautiful work that explores the difficult themes of collective versus individual memory of events that were both traumatic and terrifying.

Stern relates individual memory narratives and attempts to theorize memory in order to understand the specificity of Chilean struggles to understand their past. In this volume, Stern investigates Chile’s collective memory on the eve of Pinochet’s arrest in London for crimes against humanity. He establishes four types of emblematic memories that have competed in the peoples’ minds: memory as salvation, memory as rupture, memory as persecution and awakening, and memory as a closed box. He argues that on the eve of Pinochet’s arrest, the memory question overflowed ordinary boundaries, connecting the political, the moral, and the existential. It challenged political loyalties and alliances; it entangled the personal and the public. The various emblematic memories had come together in the memory box to form what Stern calls a “memory impasse,” in which no particular memory reigned supreme. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 provides a unique retelling of the critical events that lead to the 1973 coup and the military period that followed it while also raising deeply important questions about collective memory and trauma.

General Pinochet on parade in Buenos Aires, September 11, 1982. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Recent Posts