To them, blood equals medals,
Slaughter is an act of heroism…
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
Horror which I am dying.
The “knife-like precision” of the coup could not have happened without funding and advice from the United States. Contemplating the prospect of Allende’s electoral victory in 1970, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke plainly: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
When Allende assumed office, more than 100 US corporations had established themselves in Chile. Among these were some of the top US-based multinational corporations. These included the major car manufacturers, oil companies, Dow and DuPont chemicals and International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) among others. Their collective investment in Chile was nearly $1 billion, with ITT’s investment ranking the highest, at $200 million, according to Business Week, April 10, 1971.
The election of the Allende government was followed by an extensive CIA-initiated destabilization campaign. Washington could not and would not “stand by” and let a Latin American country determine its own fate. A country that had chosen a “peaceful road to socialism” would not be tolerated. As Allende astutely pointed out: “Foreign capital and imperialism, united with reactionary elements, created the climate for the armed forces to break with their tradition [of respecting constitutional guarantees].”
For Chileans all over the world September 11, 2001, meant reliving the horror they had experienced in Chile and feeling again the loss, not only for loved ones but also the loss of hope, and a sense that the nightmare had just begun. Chileans had dared to want to determine their own future, create their own society. Instead, Chile was for decades plunged into a darkness from which it has not recovered. The repercussions of the coup are still felt today; and Chile, generally speaking, has not confronted its past. After 1973, Pinochet tried to erase the past so that young Chileans were kept ignorant of their country’s history. Patricio Guzmán’s 1997 documentary, “Obstinate Memory,” shows Chilean university students confronted for the first time with images of the September 11 military attacks on the Presidential Palace. Face to face with their suppressed history, the students break down in anger and disbelief.
There are those who do not want to relive the horror, and those who choose to remain indifferent, and those who choose to forget. But we must face the past, learn from it and seek the truth. It is time now to “overcome [that] gray and bitter moment where treason [tried] to impose itself,” and live out Allende’s dream so eloquently articulated in his last radio address to the people of Chile: “History is ours, and the people will make it.”
“What does a person do at that moment? When two hours before, everything was as it always had been and then all at once you see this heavy artillery, and all these planes flying over La Moneda, the whole horrible sequence of events.”
—Ana María, young Chilean activist, 1973
Ariel Dorfman
I have been through this before.
During the last 28 years, Tuesday, September 11 has been a date of mourning, for me and millions of others, ever since that day in 1973 when Chile lost its democracy in a military coup, that day when death irrevocably entered our lives and changed us forever. And now, almost three decades later, the malignant gods of random history have wanted to impose upon another country that dreadful date, again a Tuesday, once again an 11th of September filled with death.
The differences and distances that separate the Chilean date from the American are, one must admit, considerable. The depraved terrorist attack against the most powerful nation on Earth has and will have consequences which affect all humanity. It is possible that it may constitute, as President Bush has stated, the start of World War III and it is probable that it will be branded in the manuals of the future as the day when the planet’s history shifted forever. Whereas very few of the eight billion people alive today could remember or would be able to identify what happened in Chile.
And yet, from the moment when, transfigured, I watched on our television screen here in North Carolina that second plane exploding into the World Trade Center’s South Tower, I have been haunted by the need to understand and extract the hidden meaning of the juxtaposition and coincidence of these two September 11s—which in my case becomes even more enigmatic and personal because it is a violation that conjoins the two foundational cities of my existence, the New York which gave me refuge and joy during 10 years of my infancy and the Santiago which protected my adolescence under its mountains and made me into a man, the two cities that offered me my two languages, English and Spanish. It has been, therefore, tentatively, breathing slowly to overcome the emotional shock; making every effort not to look again and again at the contaminating photo of the man who falls vertically, so straight, so straight, from the heights of that building; trying to stop thinking about the last seconds of those plane passengers who know that their imminent doom will also kill thousands of their own innocent compatriots; in the midst of frantic phone calls that should tell me if my friends in Manhattan are well and that nobody answers; it is in the middle of all this turmoil that I yield myself to the gradual realization that there is something horribly familiar, even recognizable, in this experience that (North) Americans are now passing through.
The resemblance I am evoking goes well beyond a facile and superficial comparison—for instance, that both in Chile in 1973 and in the States today, terror descended from the sky to destroy the symbols of national identity, the Presidential Palace in Santiago, the icons of financial and military power in New York and Washington. No, what I recognize is something deeper, a parallel suffering, a similar pain, a commensurate disorientation, echoing what we lived through in Chile as of that September 11. Its most extraordinary incarnation—I still cannot believe what I am witnessing—is that on the screen I see hundreds of relatives wandering the streets of New York, clutching the photos of their sons, fathers, wives, lovers, daughters, begging for information, asking if they are alive or dead, the whole United States forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with no certainty or funeral possible for those beloved men and women who are missing. And I also recognize and repeat that sensation of extreme unreality that invariably accompanies great disasters caused by human iniquity, so much more difficult to cope with than natural catastrophes. Over and over again I hear phrases that remind me of what people like me would mutter to themselves during the 1973 military coup and the days that followed: “This cannot be happening to us. This sort of excessive violence happens to other people and not to us, we have only known this form of destruction through movies and books and remote photographs. If it’s a nightmare, why can’t we awaken from it?” And words reiterated unceasingly, 28 years ago and now again in the year 2001: “We have lost our innocence. The world will never be the same.”
What has come to an explosive conclusion, of course, is the United States’ famous exceptionalism, that attitude which allowed the citizens of this country to imagine themselves as beyond the sorrows and calamities that have plagued less fortunate peoples around the world. None of the great battles of the 20th century had touched the continental United States. Even the Pearl Harbor “Day of Infamy” which is being tiredly extricated from the past as the only possible analogous incident, occurred thousands of miles away. It is that complacent invulnerability which has been fractured forever. Life in these United States will have to share, from now on, the precariousness and uncertainty that is the daily lot of the enormous majority of this planet’s other inhabitants.
In spite of the tremendous pain, the intolerable losses that this apocalyptic crime has visited upon the American public, I wonder if this trial does not constitute one of those opportunities for regeneration and self-knowledge that, from time to time, is given to certain nations. A crisis of this magnitude can lead to renewal or destruction; it can be used for good or for evil, for peace or for war, for aggression or