-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.webdelsol.com/AGNI/ag2-cw.htm <A HREF="http://www.webdelsol.com/AGNI/ag2-cw.htm">Agni Essay, Carolyne Wright</A> ----- Essay fom Agni, Web Issue 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CAROLYNE WRIGHT Open Secrets: An Insider's Introduction to Allende's Chilie I owe my first introduction to Chilean life to Alan Jacobs, a former Fulbright grantee of a few years before. He had stayed on in Chile, teaching high-school history and social studies at Nido de �guilas, the English-medium American school where U. S. Embassy personnel and other foreign diplomats sent their children. By the time I knew him, Alan had already achieved the goal which, soon after arriving in Chile, I found to be my own as well. He had entered as fully into Chilean society--on its own terms--as any norteamericano I had ever met. And he had been (as far I could tell) accepted on those terms. For me he became a bridge to the new culture; and like many a bridge, he was destined to be burned. I met Alan at one of those parties given by high-level Embassy attach�s, at villas in the barrio alto--the middle and upper-class suburbs--parties which began late in the afternoon over pisco sours and hors d'oeuvres, and ended at 4 a.m. amidst incoherent arguments about NFL football scores, Sino-Soviet trade agreements, and the shrinking value of the dollar. The occasional slurred reference to long-haired, drugged and dissident hippy youth gave the only clue that it was 1971, the height of the Vietnam War. But why would anyone think of such things here? Santiago was a full hemisphere away from the theatre of war, a city in which peace prevailed, at least for the moment. At all such gatherings, there was the same assortment of florid-faced Embassy officials, graying senior Fulbright professors, mid-thirties Peace Corps management types posted in Santiago. (The actual volunteers were all out in the countryside, living in shacks and eating roast maize and sopa de taillarines with the peasants). There were also spouses of all these, and a few select Chilean businessmen and landowners, golfing buddies of the Ambassador. The conversations were all in English, except among the Chilean wives, who sat together in one corner of the sunken living room in their cocktail dresses and stiletto heels, gossiping in Spanish. In a letter home, I commented with unusual vehemence on the "terrible Embassy party. All those drunken Americans and a lot of phony arty pretensions in the wealthy Chileans, and I couldn't leave until Mrs. Korry went out the door." About Mrs. Korry, I and my fellow Fulbrighters Barbara and Marilyn had been coached by our unofficial mentor, an American journalist named Gina who was conducting a study of the Chilean news media through the University of Chile. Gina told us that diplomatic protocol dictated that other American women had to remain at the party until the highest-ranking woman, the Ambassador's wife, departed. I never again went to these parties, but it was fortunate that I was held up at this one. As I wandered between chatting groups of dignitaries, I noticed a slight, bespectacled fellow in blue jeans and tweed jacket, lingering by the chip-dip table. He had dark curly hair and olive skin; he looked like a Chilean graduate student. I must have appeared as out of place to him as he did to me, because he caught my eye and said, in American English, "It's not easy to find the real Chile here, is it?" He shifted his glass of beer to his other hand to shake mine and introduce himself--Alan Jacobs--before continuing the discourse he had been carrying on in his head. He said he had been reading recent issues of Ercilla, the Chilean version of Time magazine, about the production slowdowns at Chuquicamata, the open-pit copper mine up north, the largest in the world. In one of his first acts as president, Allende had expropriated this and other mines at El Teniente, and elsewhere, from the American-owned Anaconda and Kennecott companies. Alan hadn't been up North for two years, when Eduardo Frei was president and the mines were in full operation, and he wanted to see the difference. "The only problem is," he said, flashing a crooked smile at me, "I don't want to go by myself." Alan refilled my wine glass. I asked him what made him decide to stay in Chile. "It's just started to get interesting here," he said. Furthermore, he had no desire to go home to Phoenix, where his father, he said, was a prominent lawyer. He didn't want to follow in his father's footsteps to Stanford Law and then some cushy private practice. After finishing a degree in history and political science at Pomona College, Alan had come to Chile to study its party system. He renewed his grant for a second year to stay close to the action during the presidential campaigns of 1969-70. Just before Allende was elected on September 4, 1970, Alan started teaching at Nido de �guilas. He didn't want to leave until he absolutely had to. "Besides," he lowered his voice conspiratorially, "something really big is going to happen here in the next few years." He nodded, looking intently at me to observe my reaction, then he removed his glasses to clean them with a cocktail napkin. "Like what?" I asked. He looked up--he had rather nice brown eyes behind his thick lenses. "I can't talk about it here." He jerked his head towards the groups of diplomats drinking and chatting across the room. "But we could continue this conversation another day, over lunch." I accepted his invitation with more interest than I thought I would. A few days later, we met at the Fulbright office, just off the Alameda. We walked a few blocks to a popular restaurant on Calle Miraflores, where Chilean office workers and bank clerks ate, and where it wasn't likely we'd be overheard if we spoke in low voices in English. The walls of the long narrow room were decorated with travel-poster prints of Chilean scenes: huasos in short capes, flat-brimmed hats and spurs, mounted on wiry Andalusian ponies; yokes of black and white oxen pulling high-wheeled carts along a rutted track against a snowy mountain backdrop; the perfect snow-covered cone of Volc�n Osorno, rising like a New World Mount Fuji from its own reflection in Lake Llanquihue. We took a table under the poster of Osorno. Alan studied the menu, a typed sheet in a clear plastic sleeve. "This place has real Chilean cooking," he said. "I recommend the cazuela de pollo." The waiter came with a basket of bread and a bottle of vino tinto, the house wine. Alan gave the order, pointing to items on the menu and questioning the waiter in perfect, unaccented Spanish about the methods of preparation of different dishes. In his dark pullover sweater and black beret, he looked a bit like a revolutionary. When the waiter left, I told him his Spanish was excellent. "Thanks. Most Chileans think I'm Costarrican or Colombian when they first meet me. I don't tell them I'm American unless I have to." He then asked me why I'd applied for Chile. "To read Neruda in his own country, mainly. And because professors I spoke to said the Spanish here was good. It wasn't because of Allende." Before arriving in Chile in July, 1971, I had had only a vague idea of the political situation. The previous year, while I was doing the application, someone had given me a Time magazine article about "Allende's socialist experiment." But the reality to which the article referred was distant and provisional. I had no background information then by which to judge its importance. "You realize," Alan was saying, "that the Institute of International Education receives money from the CIA? Ramparts did an expos� of this a few years ago." "No," I said. "I didn't realize." But I did know, because the information was buried somewhere in the prose of the application brochure, that the original 1946 Fulbright legislation authorized the use of money owed to the United States, through the sale abroad of surplus war material, to finance educational exchanges. This meant that Chile was paying back some of what it owed for armaments, not directly to the U. S. government in expensive hard currency--dollars--but in its own currency to us, individual scholars, to support our study and living expenses here. It was odd to think of myself implicated, however marginally, in the international arms trade. Although I was philosophically opposed to the Vietnam War, the bombing of Cambodia, and American military intervention anywhere in the world, I figured, on a more practical level, that if Chile had to pay off its weapons debt anyway, a grant giving me the opportunity to spend a year here was not a bad way to do so. But Alan's talk was making me uncomfortable with this rationalization. The waiter came with our orders. After we had eaten for a few minutes, Alan held up his glass of wine and said, "Yes, in a certain sense we're all just pawns of the Defense Department. Our government gave arms to this country for years, but that's all stopped now. The Secretary of Defense vowed that not one nut or bolt would get into Chile as long as the socialists were in power." "If you knew this, why did you accept the grant? Or request another year after that?" I kept my voice as even as I could. I didn't know Alan well enough to let him see I was annoyed. He tipped his glass toward me, flashed one of his crooked smiles and said, "How else could I come down here and find out things? Or meet you?" I flushed. He was rather dashing, in a shaggy, near-sighted way. "You're a lot closer," he went on, "to what the selection committees look for when they give out these grants. I think you really believe all the unofficial goodwill ambassador business in the application brochures." One evening soon after, Alan took me to his house to teach me the cueca, the national dance of Chile. The following week was the Dieciocho , the 18th of September, Chile's independence day. He was invited to the festivities by his Nido de �guilas colleagues; he planned to take me, and we would be expected, he said, to perform. Alan lived on a street just off the Avenida Vitacura, in a big, shabby, Tudor-style house. Most of its rooms were rented out to male foreign students, mainly Argentines and Peruvians, and a group of Brasilians whom I heard laughing and talking all at once in the kitchen as we walked past. Alan led me into a bare, cement-floored common room on the ground level, and disappeared for a moment, returning with an old box-style portable record player and a handful of Chilean records. Putting an album of cueca tunes on the machine and pulling a white handkerchief out of his jacket pocket, he demonstrated the steps for me, tapping his heels and toes to the rhythms of the guitar and bombo--the horse-hide covered Argentine drum--and twirling the handkerchief over h is head. Then he made me imitate, taking my left hand in his and putting his right hand on my shoulder to guide me. "Just watch my feet," Alan said. When I made a mistake or broke off, laughing at my own clumsiness, he steered me firmly back into position. "No fooling around now," he said. "You have to be able to do this right. I already told my friends you could." He was patient with me, but it was clear he was a perfectionist in the art of mastering Chilean culture. After more than three years here, he did not want to look or act like a gringo. I had arrived less than two months before, and I was pleased to have someone to give me the benefit of his experience. So for Alan's sake as well as my own, I made sure I learned the cueca's basic steps that evening. The Dieciocho festivities were a family and neighborhood affair, celebrations that looked back with nostalgia to Chile's rural past--and to the days of the latifundos and haciendas, the huge feudal farming estates of the Central Valley that first Frei's and now Allende's government was striving to break up. People of all classes got together to eat, drink, and (for those who could afford it) dress in the traditional huaso garb--short ponchos, flat-brimmed hats, boots and spurs for men; and long skirts, fringed shawls, and lace head-dresses for women. I wondered why this particular costume had come to represent Chile's heritage. It had to do, most likely, with the power the landed oligarchy exerted, and with the power the idea of landed wealth still exerted--even though many of the latifundo families now lived in Santiago, or abroad, as absentee landlords of estates managed by others. It was interesting to observe, though, that the symbols of this holiday celebrated an era, a way of life inimical to the reforms Allende promoted. These symbols had become so identified with the national spirit, though, that the oppressive social and economic realities which oligarchy created for the majority of Chileans were forgotten, even by Allende supporters, in the glow of patriotic fervor and merrymaking. As Alan and I rode through the streets on the morning of the Dieciocho, in one of Santiago's battered yellow and black taxis, we could see fondas, big pavilion-like tents, set up in parks and in the yards of barrio alto mansions. The fonda of Nido de �guilas was in one of the barrio alto parks, among a cluster of similar tents of other professional organizations and family groups. As we stepped out of our taxi, we were assailed by the smells of carne asado and parrillado, roast and barbecued meat, wafting from the cooking pits. Alan's colleagues greeted us with "Bienvenidos! Viva Chile!" On a long table inside the fonda, they had set out platters of meat and cheese empanadas , pots of cazuela (stew), dishes of steaming choclos (corn on the cob), baskets of bread, great bowls of sangr�a, bottles of chicha (corn liquor) and soda pop. Small red, white and blue Chilean flags of stiff paper, glued to dowel sticks and stuck into balsa wood bases, decorated the tables at intervals between the dishes. Larger paper flags were strung pennant-like along the tent walls. A heavy-set man with stiff black hair, a math teacher named Sergio, approached us with a big smile. He clapped Alan on the back and motioned for two glasses of vino tinto, red wine, for a toast to the Dieciocho and to us, the two visiting gringos, especially to Alan's new se�orita. The other male teachers greeted me with Latin gallantries, shook my hand, and made signals with their eyes to Alan--congratulating him for his female companion. The women teachers admired my improvised "Chilean" outfit: a long-sleeved blouse with one of my grandmother's Tyrolean silk scarves draped over the shoulders, a longish wool skirt too warm for the spring day, patent leather boots bought in a Providencia shop the previous week. In this approximation of the styles I'd been observing in Santiago since my arrival, I felt overdressed and artificial. Alan guided me through the afternoon, explaining the various Chilean dishes, refilling my glass with more vino and sangr�a than I should have had on a warm spring day, and introducing me to all his friends. He had switched to Spanish the minute we emerged from the taxi. "You need to practice, and become equally comfortable in both languages with me," he said. He reverted to English only to translate, or to explain chilenismos, Chilean terms I hadn't heard before. I was still at the early phase of my stay, when speaking nothing but Spanish for more than an hour or two left me mentally weary, craving silence and rest. But with Alan at my elbow, I couldn't stroll away and sit by myself for a while under the huge old European shade trees bordering the park, to watch from a distance the activity around the flag-bedecked tents. So I let myself drift while standing there, as the alcohol suffused my thoughts, and the odors of wood smoke, grilled meat, baked bread, and trampled grass passed over me in the tepid breeze that wafted into the tent. There was a smell of horses, too. I'd noticed a water trough at the edge of the park where some vendors and draymen lounged against the sides of their rough carts, smoking and chatting, while their nags drank from the trough, nosed feed bags, drowsed in the pale sun. I wondered if they--or the pair of mounted carabineros riding by on their alert chestnut thoroughbreds, keeping an eye on the movements of people around the tents--would have any holiday time with their families. Alan kept steering me from one Chilean colleague to another--none of the other American teachers had attended the fonda. His colleagues greeted him with a great deal of warmth: "Hola, Alan! C�mo te va? Qu� bueno verte!" They smiled at me and said "Mucho gusto" or "Encantado," then drew me into one of those opening conversations that would be so often repeated: "What are you doing in Chile? My, isn't your Spanish good! Where did you study it? What do you think of our country? Such a crazy geography, no? Ah, but it's so underdeveloped, not like your Norteam�rica!" ===== Although I soon wearied of these questions and comments, I tried to answer as best I could. Eventually I evolved a little set speech, in which my accent and phrasing were far more polished than in more spontaneous conversations. It was enough to satisfy most people. I began to joke that I should record these responses, and then just turn on the tape machine whenever I was introduced to someone. To answer Chileans' questions about my country, and about my presence in and attitudes toward their country, was, I knew, part of my tacit responsibility as an "unofficial" goodwill ambassador of the United States--regardless of whether the Insitute of International Education received funds from the CIA. But I was uncomfortable with the way so many Chileans felt compelled to remind me how small and backward their country was in comparison with mine. My reaction to these apologies was always to extol the glacial beauty of the cordillera, the grandeur and bounty of Chile's 3,000 miles of coastline, the wealth of its natural resources and the dignity and warmth of its people--until I sounded like a conciliatory travel brochure writer. I felt I had to counteract this impulse to underscore Chile's inadequacies. What I did not realize then was how deeply the legacy of colonialism was impressed in the national psyche. Even after the 1810 independence from 300 years of Spanish rule, Chile had been dominated by foreign interests--British, German, North American--who invested in, developed, and reaped huge profits from the principal export industries of nitrate and copper mining. The national economy was virtually controlled by the demand for, and the prices of, these commodities on the world market; but the foreign companies were the major beneficiaries. Very little of the profit trickled down to the working classes who supplied the labor. Although mining and its subsidiary industries at least provided them with jobs, the wages were low, prices of food, clothing and consumer items in the mining settlements were high, strikes (such as the 1907 nitrate miners' protest of Santa Mar�a de Iquique) were often violently suppressed, and there were few other employment options. Only the ruling oligarchy, and a small urban mercantile class, grew fabulously wealthy from their middlemen's dealings with the foreign companies. With few exceptions, though, they did not start mining companies, invest in processing plants or build railroads and shipping facilities. They used their wealth to purchase French furniture, cut-glass chandeliers from Belgium, carriages and later motorcars from England and America. They sent their children to school in Paris, bought homes on the Costa del Sol, and put the remainder of their assets into Swiss banks. The capital that flowed into Chile from its principal exports flowed back out again. A potentially wealthy country was far less developed, prosperous or economically independent than it could have been. After World War I, when synthetic nitrate had been invented and Chile's natural reserves were nearly exhausted anyway, copper mining emerged as the first-ranking industry and the major source of foreign exchange. With Germany defeated and Britain reduced to a debtor nation, control of the copper mines and other mineral concerns was assumed by U. S. corporations. Chile moved further into the orbit of North American influence, both economic and political. In 1948, Chile joined the Organization of American States, committing herself to support of U. S. anti-communist policies. The United States began to send military "advisors" and armaments, and to admit Chilean officers for training in the American army, under the 1951 Mutual Security and the 1952 Mutual D efense Acts. Professional contacts were established between the two armed forces, and the sympathy of the Chilean military towards U. S. defense policies and priorities was ensured. In the ensuing years, more and more American and multinational companies moved in to Chile--Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, International Telephone and Telegraph, the Bank of America--building industries and businesses that employed some Chileans but produced goods and services for their own wealthy, developed home countries. Land reform laws had been adopted in 1962, during the presidency of Jorge Alessandri, due to pressures in the Chilean Congress from the newly formed Christian Democratic party and a coalition of socialist and leftist parties led by Salvador Allende. These laws provided a legal basis for expropriation from large landholders and redistribution to small cultivators, but very few pieces of property had actually changed hands. Agriculture was still dominated by the landowning families of the feudal oligarchy, who had invested little to modernize farming methods and equipment on their huge estates. As a consequence, food production was on the decline. Eduardo Frei's administration enacted legislation that permitted several million acres from the largest, most poorly managed haciendas to be expropriated. Allende's government continued and accelerated this process, but it would have taken several years to develop and modernize agricultural production. Despite a large middle class and a tradition of relatively stable (for Latin America) democratic government, Chile still lacked the means, by the time Allende was elected, to provide sufficient food, clothing, housing and consumer goods at affordable prices for all her people. Until Allende moved to nationalize key industries, the controlling interest in Chile's economy was still held by the oligarchy and a consortium of American and multinational companies. So in this pleasant park, a little over a year after Allende's election, surrounded by comfortable upper middle-class barrio alto homes, Chileans still felt themselves to be standing in the long shadow of their huge, wealthy, powerful northern neighbor. Even the presence of two norteamericanos at their Dieciocho celebration must have served to remind our hosts of the tenuous nature of their independence, at least in its economic aspects. Already that day, along the route our taxi had taken, Alan and I had seen posters and billboards that joyfully proclaimed "Viva Chile Mierda!" ("Long Live Shitty Chile!"). The naughty-adolescent tone of this phrase perfectly illustrated the mixture of inferiority complex and perverse pride that seemed to pervade the national consciousness. We could hear this slogan being shouted from nearby fondas as friends greeted each other, and as cueca tunes started and people began to clap and stomp their feet. I thought of the Fourth of July in my own affluent super-power nation: just another long holiday weekend, dominated by highway fatality statistics, firework displays, and opportunities for major advertisers to sell their products in patriotic packaging. For Chile, the independence celebrations still had an air of ongoing struggle, especially now that Allende's election had thrown the country's political future into uncertainty. Alan's colleague Sergio was putting a record on the portable tocadiscos sitting on a table at one side of the tent. He called to us to come dance. We all stood in a circle outside the fonda, clapping in time to the cueca's opening measures. The first few couples stepped into the ring, tapping their heels and toes as they circled each other, left hands at their hips, right hands waving white handkerchiefs over their heads. As each set of couples finished, we applauded them with shouts of "Bravo! Viva Chile!" Then the cry went up: "Let the gringos dance!" Before I could hesitate, Alan steered me firmly into the circle. I'd had just enough to drink to be able to relax and follow his lead, twirling my handkerchief over my hand with what I hoped was some finesse, and tapping my feet in the correct patterns. Alan spun loops around me, slapping his calves and thighs, and ducking for the fancy Cossack-style men's kicks. He grasped his handkerchief in both hands above his head, or whirled it dizzyingly about my head like a Chilean gallant. I was just grateful I could maintain the basic steps. When the music ended, our friends cheered and exclaimed that they hadn't believed norteamericanos could do the cueca at all. Alan became my teacher and guide in more than dancing the cueca. After the Dieciocho, he started me on exercises to improve my Spanish, with short practice sessions every time we met. He taught me tongue-twisters: "T�o Timoteo, no toques tu trompeta, toca tu tromb�n," and "Tres tristes tigres trayen trigo al trigal." I had to repeat them over and over, faster and faster, without stumbling, until I had them perfect. As we walked along the street, or rode in taxis, Alan often startled me out of my revery (gazing at the passing scene, and only half-listening to what he was saying) with a nudge and the words "T�o Timoteo." Without hesitation or error, I had to recite whichever tongue-twister he put to me at that moment. The competitive spirit Alan brought to these learning exercises was irksome at times, especially when I was tired or annoyed about something. But it was immensely helpful to be challenged like this all the time, just as I was anyway in day-to-day interactions with Chileans. "I'm only making you do what I had to make myself do," Alan said when I complained. "If I can learn this way, by myself, you certainly can." He had me read aloud to him from books as well. Once, when we were about to leave for a crafts fair in the Parque Forestal, he went back into his room and came out with a small paperback copy of Juan Ram�n Jim�nez's Platero y yo. "This is what I learned from," he said. "Every morning, and every night before going to sleep, I read a chapter aloud to myself, until I got the pronunciation right." I looked at the book's cover, with a whimsical silver-toned illustration of its famous donkey hero. "Read it," Alan said. "You're the poet, you'll like the language." I opened to the first page: "Platero es peque�o, peludo, suave . . ." I read the first short chapter, Alan stopping me to correct my vowel sounds. The prose itself forced my mouth wider to make the consonants clear and precise--like the sea off the coast of Andaluc�a--the vowels bright and sharp like sun reflecting from whitewashed village walls. From such reading, I came to understand the pellucid Mediterranean quality of this language, even as it had been clipped and softened by its transplantation to a precarious narrow shelf of land between the Andes and the Pacific. It was not such a simple language to render correctly, no matter what other students had thought in high school, where common wisdom held that it was an easy "B" course at least. "Tien' asero," said the Andalusian peasant of Platero, of the obduracy of his species. The language, too, was of steel--steel and silver, like Platero. I read other books Alan recommended, and he had me discuss them with him--in Spanish of course: this was the next phase of my Chilean education. I had to make note of, and look up in my Spanish-English dictionary, any new words I came across in my reading, and then use them in my verbal summaries of the books. "You only know a word when you can use it correctly in conversation," Alan told me. Fortunately he didn't make me write out these exercises. "I have enough papers from my high-school students," he said. After his school let out, and my classes were finished at the university, we would meet at one of the caf�s along the Avenida Providencia, to continue my informal studies. Once, Alan invited me to Nido de �guilas, to have lunch, see the library, and, if I were interested, to enquire about teaching there myself if I decided to stay on in Chile. He didn't invite me to sit in on any of his classes. I remember the single-storey, American-style building, set back on a large plot at the outermost edge of the barrio alto, where the foothills began to rise toward the snowy ridge of the cordillera. Inside the school were broad hallways lined with lockers, lots of windows looking out on the tree-lined lawn and on the playgrounds full of swingsets and tether-ball poles. Classrooms and the library were well-stocked with new books and brightly-colored bulletin board displays. The students, from grades K-12, were all loud, confident, and (except for a few foreign diplomats' children) blond. They were modishly dressed, boys and girls alike in the bellbottom jeans and brilliant polyester shirts and blouses that were fashionable then. There were no uniforms. In its Third World setting, the school had been well-named, by someone with a cruel sense of irony--Eagle's Nest, breeding place of the powerful and predatory. A lair for raptors in a country full of crows. I couldn't help but compare this well-funded institution with the Chilean public schools I had seen: gloomy three-storey buildings with a narrow ring of concrete for schoolyard between the soot-blackened brick walls and the street, scores of dark-haired children pouring out of the overcrowded classrooms in their ill-fitting hand-me-down uniforms, each clutching a handful of battered textbooks or a grimy satchel. They all walked home or ran to the city bus stop to catch the regular micros (already jammed with homebound factory and office workers) back to their houses in distant lower-middle class neighborhoods. At the end of the school day, the Nido de �guilas students were met by a fleet of vans and minibusses to transport them home. Some of them had shiny new cars, with uniformed drivers and diplomatic license plates, waiting for them in the parking lot. That afternoon, Alan and I got a ride from the school from an American, Bob, a burly, sunburned man with thinning blond hair who had come to pick up his teenaged sons. He drove a Land Rover bearing the logo of the agricultural development organization for which he worked. We stopped at a pizza place on Providencia, and sat under a Cinzano umbrella-shaded table on the terrace in the late afternoon sun. Bob's wife and a few other development agency colleagues of theirs joined us; the teenaged sons lurked at another table, smirking at each other and watching Chilean girls strolling by on the street. The talk was all of crop yields and irrigation patterns, average rainfall and rural credit schemes. I sat listening, growing restless and sleepy as the sun sank too low for the umbrella and threw a blinding shaft across our table. Finally I asked about land reform. There was a silence, as everyone at the table turned and looked at me. (Alan, for a change, looked away, not saying anything.) It was as if I had uttered a dirty word. Bob cleared his throat. "We're naturally very concerned with increasing the agricultural output of this country," he said. "With more food available, prices will drop, and the nutritional levels of the poor will improve. Chile won't have to import foodstuffs she can grow herself. With a higher standard of living, the small farmer will be a better worker, and productivity will increase that much more. . ." I wanted to interrupt and ask him how he could be sure that the fruits of increased production would automatically be made available domestically, and at lower prices. What if it was all earmarked for export, to bring in foreign exchange? And what about the landless cultivator, the inquilino who worked as a feudal sharecropper on the latifundo? How could he benefit from increased production of some cash crop on his landlord's estate, when he had no land of his own on which to grow food for his family? But Alan was looking at me strangely, and suddenly he muttered something in Spanish. "What?" I said. "D�jalo," he repeated. "Drop it." Bob was going on about how his organization could not meddle in the internal affairs of the country, or interfere with the private property of Chilean citizens. "Even if we personally believe the system is unfair," he said, "we have to work with it. Otherwise we won't accomplish anything at all." I never did find out what Bob's own views on land reform were, or why the topic was so sensitive. I never again spoke to any Americans involved with agricultural development in Chile. As the months passed, I would speak to fewer and fewer Americans anyway. But I continued to see Alan, because his main interest was in finding out what was really going on in Chile. We began to take long walks on sunny weekend afternoons in the Parque Forestal and up the Costanera, the tree-shaded parks along the banks of the R�o Mapocho. On the bridges we stopped to look up at the massive snow-covered ridge of the cordillera, usually visible on weekends above the pall of smoggy haze that hung over the city. Below us was the dark roil of spring runoff, and on the banks, ragged children fishing or playing. Women came out from the jumble of squatters' shacks propped against the concrete retaining walls, carrying baskets of clothes to wash in the shallows. A few tramps slept on flat rocks in the sun, between laundry spread out to dry on the larger boulders. "Allende's reforms haven't reached these people yet, have they?" Alan said, with a bitter little laugh. "I don't know if they will, either. Not if some of our boys can stop him." He talked to me on the bridges, and in the parks fronting the river, where no one could overhear us--not the few strolling couples, or the small groups of hippies playing guitars and smoking pitos under the trees. He was trying to find out, he said, what strings were being pulled behind the scenes at the U. S. Embassy. "There's some real dirt there," he liked to say, almost gleefully. "And I'm going to dig it up." "How are you going to do that?" I asked. "I have my spies," he would nod, mysteriously. He talked about deals the U. S. military top brass were making with leading industrialists and with disaffected officers in the Chilean Armed Forces, to destabilize Allende's government. "Most of those officers are right-wing," he said. "Even if they do believe that the Armed Forces are supposed to uphold and defend the Chilean Constitution, no matter who's elected to the presidency." "How long do you think they'll let Allende continue?" I asked, not because I believed what he was saying, but because I wanted to draw him out. "A year, two years maybe," he shrugged. "It depends how long it takes to make the economy collapse, and the whole country fall apart." One afternoon, as we rode the quaint, red-painted wooden funicular car up to the top of the Cerro San Crist�bal, Santiago's highest hill, I asked him (in English, even though the car was almost empty) why he wanted to know these things. "Aren't you treading on dangerous ground? And what can you do with this information?" He shrugged and looked out at the funicular's metal track curving downward between cypress and palm trees. The grey plateau of the city broadened and appeared to tilt toward us as we rode higher. "It'll be useful later on," he said, "when the truth comes out." The car reached the top of the hill. Alan took hold of my elbow as we stepped onto the terrace beneath the huge, glaring white statue of the Virgin Mary which overlooked the city with outstretched stone arms. He steered me to the concrete parapet, and stood behind me, his hands touching the ledge on either side, so that I was closed in between him and the parapet. Thus trapped--or protected--I looked down with him on the somber cluster of Baroque-style public buildings in the city center, so much like those of Eastern European capitols I had seen in photographs. Alan's breath was in my hair; he pushed at my shoulder with his face and then propped his chin in the hollow above my collarbone. "Tonto," I pushed back at him, laughing. "Silly." But I didn't push him away. I suppose my real question to him, which I didn't want to formulate, was: what would they do to you if you did get hold of any sensitive information? This was two years before the Charles Horman case, later chronicled in Thomas Hauser's book, The Execution of Charles Horman, and then in the film Missing. Both book and film would document and dramatize the dangers of knowing too much about the CIA and the U. S. military's involvement in the destablization and overthrow of Allende's government. I was only dimly aware of the troubling events beneath the surface of Chilean political life in 1971, but common sense told me that Alan's life could have been in jeopardy if he had found out anything of substance. One thing was certain, though: Alan was an amateur at this game. He talked too openly and recounted his tidbits of information too gleefully to be in anyone's hire. He may have invented most of it to impress me. Even I, politically naive as I was, knew enough to keep my mouth shut if I didn't want anyone to learn what I was doing or what I had found out, if I didn't want my sources to evaporate. Many Chileans I met were so full of knee-jerk paranoia about the CIA that I didn't know whether to give them credence or not. But Alan's speculations and insinuations were the first I had heard from another U. S. citizen about American interference in Chile's affairs. Superficial though they were, Alan's declarations to me came three years before the 1974 Congressional hearings on Chile--hearings that would demonstrate the falseness of previously maintained State Department claims of a hands-off policy during the Allende years. At the time, though, I made little effort to follow up on Alan's statements. I only remember how he moved around me that afternoon, and seated himself on the parapet with his back to the city. "Not to worry, my dear," he grinned. "I haven't found out anything that isn't common knowledge. What's going on here is an open secret. You'll see." He rested his hands on my shoulders and looked at me, serious now, his curly hair riffling in the stiff breeze. Beyond the city, deepening to blue-gray shadow as the first scattered lights came on, the cordillera dissolved in a mauve-colored haze of dust and smog. We took the funicular car back down the hill, to make our way to Alan's house through the darkening streets below. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
