A little more serious but please read

So Friday I went to Santiago to see many historical sites. Needless to say it was a very emotional taxing day but important to see. We started out with in my opinion what should have been last because it was happy and light. We went to the solidarity of the women who live in the projects where they show them how to make quality projects,and  require them to interact, so they don't forget how due to their husbands coming home and just wanting food. It was early in the morning so when we were welcomed with homemade sopaipillas (fried bread) and warm tea, it was excellent! Everything there is fair trade. I couldn't resist buying a llama mosaic and really wish I had known a preschool teacher because they had the CUTEST finger puppets with a classic story (Beauty and the Beast for example) in Spanish and English.

Next were the archives of all the cases of the disappeared. For those of you who don't know, Augusto Pinochet was a dictator in Chile from 1973-1990 who literally overthrew the current socialist government, granted they weren't economically well off, but enforced curfews, and among other things, anyone caught knowing the wrong person i.e. a Red or Socialist or anything but military dictatorship, of course many of the poor, "disappeared." There are still 200,000 people who have yet to be accounted for. Horrible horrible man. However, it is important to also know that he kept drugs and crime under control, helped the economy, and did produce good things, just NOT the way in which he did it. After literally seeing roomS full of hundreds if not thousands of binders and filing cabinets of these poor people I was at least glad to see people are working to help them. Because the tour was of said filing cabinets and binders, I must admit my interest drifted.

Then we went to the cementery. This is a HUGE cementery-so huge it has street signs and cars can drive through it. The front part is a GORGEOUS park with many beautiful temples of tombs for lack of a better word. This includes past presidents, many famous names that I sadly only knew by streets in Valpo-and the rest of Chile because all streets have the same names regardless of where you are in Chile. After the cementery in Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, and now this one, in a non-morbid way i really enjoy walking through cementeries such as these to learn about people and they are gorgeous places here (see photos when I upload them ;)). Eventually we came to what Lizette calls "real Chile," where the castle tombs evolved into slots in a wall and eventually into wooden crosses sticking out of the ground. Patio 91 is where many of the disappeared are if not buried, at least recognized. The sad thing is there is a wall of people who are not accounted for and a wall of people who are-and it's almost the same number!

This sentiment of "sad" turned to nauseating, hatred, aghast, and whatever other word describes extreme appallation (i might have just made that word up) when we visited Villa Grimaldi, a beautiful park  now that was the detention center of where the "disappeared" went-ie a torture center. I can hardly write the details of this place here but let me try to give you at least the basic idea.

What are now gates you can see through used to be a brick wall,  a flame in the entryway which is a symbol of it NEVER happening again, and only a model in the center of what the place used to look like. Basically men, women and CHILDREN, were taken here to obtain information. If they didn't spill....there were three methods..Drowning, dry drowning which consists of putting your head in a plastic bag filled with sawdust that you would swallow making you throw up and then inhaling that, and the electric bed. People were kept in a wooden shed holding 5-6 of the same sex 1 m x 1m for weeks if not MONTHS! They were only let out to eat on a brick wall which is where people could figure out who was who because they were always blindfolded.

The sickest thing of all there is a rose garden in the center which is BEAUTIFUl because people could smell roses on the walk from their "cabin" to the guillotine. I will NEVER understand the human race.

The last thing we saw was inside a cube that is symbolic of being very deep underwater with water noises and everything. This is because the rails-of a train-are displayed there with a button-like a button off a blouse- that were found at the bottom of the ocean. This is proof that the bodies-dead or alive-were thrown into the ocean.

The guide told us to tell as many people as possible to ensure this will NEVER happen again. There are birch trees planted there, one for every disappeared-out of 229 people at this site alone 49 are still not accounted for-that's almost 25%!, because birches symbolize longevity. So please as hard as this has been to read, or at least I hope you are reading, please pass this on to educate everyone you know. Pinochet is still living and the verdict of guilty to innocent wanes back and forth due to him filing as "psychotic." Ya think?