Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

“You are a foreigner.” With dark eyes and jet black hair, the man looked young, but the deep lines around his eyes and neck revealed his age. “I know what that is like. I was a foreigner once, too.”

I was a thousand miles south of Santiago, wandering through a small rural rodeo on the west coast of Chile. I had come here to explore another part of the country, away from the hustle and bustle of the capital city. As I walked through town, a man approached me. Because Chile is so devoutly Catholic, I feared that I was headed for an offer of salvation, but to my relief, he wanted to talk about this world.

“I’m sure you know the history here. When Pinochet came into power, I was held and tortured as a prisoner without reason or trial.” I listened, not quite sure why he was disclosing all of this to me. “I was held for over a year, and then exiled. I had no money, and no place to go. Denmark agreed to take political refugees, so that’s where I went. I lived there for 15 years, but it never felt like home. Once things changed and I was allowed to, I returned here in 1991.”

He spoke slowly, as though I would better comprehend those 15 years if he dragged out the words. “And let me tell you something that you don’t know because you are so young. You cannot fully appreciate your freedom until it has been taken away. You are not able to know the value of your rights. I hope you will never have to learn. But cherish them.”

“How do people here feel about your return?” I asked, not sure what else to say.

“They don’t really care. They have their own problems and they’re happy to see me, but that’s it. No one ever asked me anything about my time away, or what it was like. They are like this,” he said, cupping his dirty hands around both sides of his head like a thoroughbred’s blinders. “People focus on their own problems. They have to.”

He spoke with a humble intensity. As we parted ways, I thought about how profoundly the coup had changed his life, and how many others’ lives had also been transformed.

It was in the neighborhood of Providencia, during my first week in Santiago, that I found September 11 Avenue. The street sign looked like any other. Large, dilapidated buses plodded by with signs clearly displaying their destination, September 11, in their dirty windows.

It was on September 11, 1973 that Army General Augusto Pinochet seized control of the Chilean government in a military coup. Turning the arm of the state against itself, he attacked the capital of Santiago and the Executive Mansion, which Chileans affectionately called "The Coin" since it was the printing location of Chile’s first independent currency. The democratically-elected socialist government of Dr. Salvador Allende was overthrown after three tumultuous years.

The military dictatorship that ensued was cruel and arbitrary: Thousands of innocent people disappeared, freedom of speech vanished, and a select few prospered at the cost of the majority. But despite the fact that Pinochet’s official rule had ended in 1990, when I began studying in Chile in January of 2000, it was clear that the country and many of the people living in it were still in the shadow of his regime.

As I stared at the street sign, I wondered, how could this street name endure in a post-dictatorship Chile?

My host mother’s apartment was large, yet cramped with gaudy furnishings that might have come from a Victorian rummage sale. Each evening, I ate dinner at the round, oak table in the center of the living room and chatted with my host mother about my day. We mostly discussed trivial matters, but one night, three months into my stay, she broached the subject of Chile’s checkered past.

At the beginning of dinner, when my ox-tail soup was still too hot to eat and I contented myself by methodically dipping my toast in the broth, she fired a dramatic opening salvo.

“You know that I never talk politics and that stuff,” she said, her eyes wide with dramatic anticipation. “I know that you students hear all sorts of things and read your books, but you weren’t here and you ought to know what really happened on September 11. Before Pinochet, there was no order. There was no food, people were starving, and the government was a mess. But Pinochet brought order, he brought security and money to this country, and he saved it. Of course, some people were hurt, but the stories are so exaggerated... and many of those people were troublemakers.”

She went on to utter a common refrain of Pinochet’s supporters: “To make an omelet, you have to break eggs.”

I knew that the regime’s brutality had been focused on a minority of the population. But I was surprised to learn how willing most people were to ignore it. Like people all over the world, most Chileans focus on subsistence, family, and the challenges of their daily lives, not on questions of political philosophy. Likewise, the September 11 Avenue that had so confused and captivated me was ultimately just another street to most Chileans.

My host mother and I talked for over an hour. As she continued, I thought of the returned exile I had spoken with, and the unconcerned villagers he described. I pictured him holding his hands up like blinders. I realized that she would not care about him either.