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Article Excerpt
"?Como vivir con este fardo de desdichas?"
Marta Traba's Conversacion al sur
How does one live with the burden of sorrows inflicted by a military coup and repressive police state, asks a character in Argentine novelist Marta Traba's Conversacion al sur (Mothers and Shadows). This agonizing question haunts much of Latin America today, including those nations of the Southern Cone, to which the Spanish title refers. Although democratic elections, political parties, and civil society have returned to Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, three of the countries hardest hit by state violence in the 1970s, they have found no easy path toward redressing a past marked by the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands of citizens. The "percepticide," what Diana Taylor has called the destruction of the public's ability to bear witness to acts of terror (119-38), that pervaded these societies at the height of their conflicts has not entirely dissolved with a transformation to civilian rule. Nor has the rebuilding of cityscapes and neighborhoods entirely erased a "culture of antagonism" that once constructed social identities out of political opposition and fostered a mentality of intransigence (Falconer 12). Many Chileans now recall the militancies that emerged during years of the Frei-Allende presidencies (1964-1973) as leading toward civil war, fanning a fervor in which the Right and the Left upheld ideals of society that would not brook compromise: human rights, suffering, even life itself were to be sacrificed toward the realization of political goals (National Commission 51-53). Today beneath the modern facades lie fault lines, wounds in the national psyche as well as the body politic, that continue to disturb. It is, as Carmen Castillo Echeverria found when she returned to her native Santiago, as if the unseen menace of the past was carried into one's lungs with the newly polluted air, never actually seen, but carrying with it the stench of fear (Ligne 56).
In Chile as in other states that engaged in "dirty" wars against those who were deemed internal enemies, the slow, painstaking rebuilding of democracy has had to take place alongside an intact military and amidst powerful supporters of the earlier dictatorship. Seventeen years after a military coup destroyed the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-73), the first civilian president, Patricio Aylwin, maneuvered between those who demanded justice against the perpetrators of state terror and those who insisted upon forgetting a conflictive past. Turning to a middle ground, he established the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation to gather information about the extent of violence during the military rule. His aim, as well as that of the investigators on the Commission, was to realize the hope embodied in the cry of "Never Again" and to rebuild his country through reconciliation:
Truth and justice--insofar as they can be attained through the courts--are the pillars on which a reconciled society must be built, but in themselves they are not enough. The various sectors of society affected must also be brought back together.... Only by taking such steps will we advance toward the national reconciliation that is an utter necessity and is also the primary condition for avoiding a repetition of past events. (Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation 886)
Efforts by subsequent civilian governments have followed a similar approach toward the acknowledgment of past wrongs, while refraining from exploring too deeply how political violence could have thrived in what was considered to be a nation of democratic traditions (Stern xxvi). Several "memory sites" have been erected in Santiago: a Peace Park on the site of the demolished torture center Villa Grimaldi, a three-story Memorial for the Disappeared at the entrance of the Cementerio General, as well as tombs for Salvador Allende and folksinger Victor Jara, both causalities of the 1973 coup. Yet, there is still little information to explain to visitors what happened on these sites and, surely, no indictment of the many who supported and carried out the terror unleashed by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet (Meade 126-32). It is as if these commemorative sites remain charged with the power to unleash the past, to bring back the conflicts that have been put aside, and therefore must be quieted, tamed. These are, in Steve J. Stern's analysis, "memory knots" that can interrupt the practices of daily life as well as the political goals of a fragile democratic state.
Memory knots, as I am using the term, refer to sites of humanity, sites in time, and sites of physical matter or geography. Specific human groups and leaders, specific events and dates, and specific physical sites all seem to stir up, collect, and concentrate memories, thereby "projecting" memory and polemics about memory into public space or imagination. (121)
If the dictatorship created, as Castillo avers, a "maquina de olvido" or "machine to erase memory" (vuelo 237) and the democratic state selects its memories to call for reconciliation between supporters and foes of the regime, what place can there be for Carmen Castillo to explore and articulate the memories that she has of her membership in the Marxist-Leninist Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria or MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement), her romantic involvement with its Secretary General Miguel Enriquez Espinosa, his death during a two-hour gun battle with the secret police, and finally her own forced exile? To be sure, a smaller MIR continues in Chile today, and former members have begun to commemorate their dead publicly. Nevertheless, the radical organization, which once rejected the reformist agendas and electoral politics of the traditional Chilean Left in favor of an "armed path" to revolution, seems to have little place in a Chile still struggling to demand human rights and to rebuild civil society. The memories of a sixties' generation, inspired by the ideal of a guerrilla vanguard that would spark insurrection--later hunted down by the infamous Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence) or DINA--recall only too closely the spirals of violence that foster antagonism. Official Chile would hope to evade these memories of "spilled blood" that must be avenged (Perilli 40), for they can transform the past into a quarry--in Joesph Liechty's words--where each side seeks stones to lob at its enemy (163-67).
Yet Carmen Castillo, daughter of the former rector of the Universidad Catolica, lived at the heart of the MIR throughout much of her young adulthood, an involvement that embraced not only her political affiliation, but also her social group of friends, lovers, and family. She reveals that her entry into revolutionary life at seventeen was primarily an infatuation with "la belleza del compromiso," the beauty of political commitment and obedience to those who embodied it. Thus she first turned to Beatriz Allende, daughter of the future president, and was fascinated by the young woman's refusal to conform to the norms of seductive femininity, insisting instead upon maintaining a serious mien that befitted her role as member of a guerrilla organization. Castillo's response to this example was to obey "la Tati:" "[m]e fascinaba su saber y su rigor, gustaba de obedecerle sin cuestionar, me plegaba a sus ordenes, buena alumna"/ I was fascinated by her knowledge and inner strength; I enjoyed obeying her without question; I followed her orders like a good student (vuelo 115). Castillo joined Allende's revolutionary group, serving as go-between ("buzon") with militants in Bolivia, and repeating that she must fight unto death ("luchar hasta morir").
As Castillo fell in love with Beatriz's cousin, Andres Pascual, who gave her a theory of revolution to interpret her practice, she entered into the leadership circle of MIR, married this Allende and had a daughter, Camila. When soon after she fell in love with Miguel Enriquez, she abandoned her flamboyant style ("good-bye to mini-skirts," she announces) to embody the simplicity of a serious revolutionary, following the wishes of her new com-panero: "me sentia alegre, descubria el gozo de obedecer a las exigencias del hombre amado"/ I was happy; I found the joy of obeying the demands of the man I loved (vuelo 120).
Once President Salvador Allende took office in 1970, both Beatriz and Carmen had offices in La Moneda, Chile's presidential palace; they celebrated holidays in the President's residences with Allende and his mistress, while other Miristas served as presidential body guards. Perhaps President Allende viewed the radicalism of the MIR as youthful enthusiasm that could be tempered to his own "Chilean way" to socialism, or perhaps he enjoyed debates with Enriquez, who was well known for his personal charisma and sharp wit. For whatever reasons, which must include close family ties, Salvador Allende allowed MIR to serve his presidency, acting offstage in most...
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