Dear Penners:
I returned from a trip to Chile not long ago, and intended to make some
quick notes for list on impresions and reacitons to the time there. It
kinda grew, thorugh no fault of my own, of course.... I will be sending
installments over the nex couple of days. As I am still "processing" the
time there, this is far from a finished essay. Instead, things that struck
me are lumped under rather random headings and explored.
I should note at the outset that as I hammered out these notes I found in a
book by Tom�s Moulian some of the conceptual vocabulary I lacked to
understand my time in Chile. In the process, what I've written has become
in part book review. Or better put, an experience review, in light of one
very fine book (Chile Actual: Anatom�a de un Mito [Chile Today: Anatomy of a
Myth]. Santiago: ARCIS-LOM, 1997. All translations are mine.)
Some may feel the tone of what follows is too testimonial. For others,
reviewing it is futile or too painful. Over dinner last night a Bolivian
friend related almost buying a book about Argentineans returned to their
country -- to their death -- during the Banzer dictatorship. But, he said,
"why read all that stuff again? We already know all that." In respect for
what others have shared with me, stories in danger of being silenced, I feel
a need to look again at these histories.
I re-embrace these histories also because we are implicated in them.
Throughout the notes that follow I have not mentioned the role of the US in
producing the conditions that led to the coup and the coup itself. You may
find this odd. My reason is simple: I have been over all that in the past,
and presume most of you already know. What I was learning this time was the
extraordinary capacity of certain Chileans -- under the tutelage and
direction of the US, yes, but still Chileans -- to wreak unspeakable trauma
on the fabric of their own society, and then systematically rewrite the
history of their deeds. And I was learning for the first time what, for a
couple of other Chileans, surviving and living the legacy of that terror and
historical revisionism means today.
Far from dodging the responsibility of looking at what US foreign policy has
wrought, I feel this is very much to the point. It means looking at how
those "macro" processes have had an indelible impact on specific people's
lives, and how they negotiate the terrain, survive in, and resist the
society produced by those processes today.
One can of course visit Chile without even getting a whiff of the things I
explore below. We stayed in a touristy hotel in Santiago filled with such
travelers. Later, with a new friend in Santiago who spent 18 years in
exile, we mentioned our sojourn to the monument to the disappeared in the
General Cemetery. "You're interested in that stuff?" she asked, "I could
show you lots of things. Right around from your hotel, in the Calle Paris,
there was a famous torture center...." Later, a block from our hotel an
enormous bus rolled past us, replete with tinted glass, windows shut for air
conditioned comfort against the blazing afternoon sun. We caught a glimpse
of nattily dressed youngsters on board. In the windshield there was a sign
reading "Grupo MIT -- MIT Group". What, we asked ourselves, have they seen
here?
For too long the right has had the upper hand on denouncing the crimes of
state in the imposition of "models". What of the ongoing "capitalist
revolutions" and the havoc wrought by their impositions? Chile is a key
case in point, ever more so as it is held up as an example of "success". In
the face of rising GNP/cap and high levels of investment, do we relegate the
past to oblivion? Is a reign of terror an acceptable price to pay for
access to overconsumption? My negative answer -- a moral imperative -- is
implicit in the question. I have spent too many evenings with the human
"collateral damage", who have been ever-patient in explaining to me what
transpired, and how they manage it today. I realize that my way of putting
things elides some of the finer points of economic theory. So be it. I
tried to listen; below some notes.
Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia
Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
