50 years on wounds still raw from Chile coup

Today, we mark the 50th anniversary of the coup that brought the right-wing dictator General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The country remains deeply divided over Pinochet’s legacy and marches to pay tribute to the thousands of “disappeared” opponents of the regime this weekend ended in violence. Chile’s left-wing President Gabriel Boric attempted to use the anniversary as a moment of national unity, calling on all political parties to condemn the coup and celebrate democracy. He has failed to reach even this most basic consensus. According to polls, 36% of the Chilean people now believe the military was right to intervene to overthrow the Socialist government of Salvador Allende in September 1973.

Index on Censorship has always had a close relationship with Chile, particularly during the editorship of Andrew Graham-Yooll (1989-1994), who was an expert on South America. In 1991, a year after the peaceful handover of power to Pinochet’s successor, Patricio Aylwin, Index published an interview with the Chilean writer and opposition figure Ariel Dorfman, alongside the English translation of his play, Death and the Maiden. Dorfman had recently returned to his native Chile after many years in exile.

Already the fissures in Chilean society were clear. Graham-Yooll identified the difficulties faced by the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation set up to investigate the murders carried out by the Pinochet regime. “The role of the Commission was intended to be cautious and to limit the chance of antagonising the military,” wrote Graham-Yooll. “Survivors of the prisons and place of torment would not be considered. Testimony received could be with withheld from the public. Compensation to the victims would be decided in closed session of parliament.”

In the interview, Dorfman said there was a fundamental difficulty in societies transitioning from dictatorship to democracy. “Basically, there will always be a co-existence in many societies between those who committed crimes and those who were repressed. This co-existence is a fact of contemporary society. It does not happen only in the Chilean transition to democracy, which in its own way is very Chilean. It happens in all the transitions – in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. We call the situation created la impunidad – the state of impunity.”

Death and the Maiden captures Chile’s conundrum. A woman whose husband has been appointed to the Commission of Inquiry into the crimes of an authoritarian regime recognises one of her former torturers. The suspect denies his crimes, the woman craves revenge, and the husband must seek justice.

In 1991, the world was full of hope. The end of the Pinochet regime seemed to be part of a global shift towards a democratic consensus that included the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid. We have learnt to know better. As Dorfman was so quick to realise after his exile, the wounds remained raw and open. “We have to say ‘hello’ politely to our adversaries and there are topics we’d better not discuss, and wherever I scratched the surface I found this terrible pain,” he told Index.

It is clear from the events in Chile over the weekend that the “terrible pain” is still there 50 years after the coup. Chile is a democratic country now, but three decades of “truth and reconciliation” have not helped heal the divisions.

Our Autumn issue of the magazine, due out next week, contains two articles on the anniversary, including an interview and new short story from Ariel Dorfman. To purchase a copy click here

Ariel Dorfman interview: Writer unveils new short story lost after Chilean coup

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman

Fifty years ago, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman wrote down the seed of a story, which he then lost in his years of exile during General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Recently he revisited the idea and realised how to develop it into his new short story, All I Ever Have, which is published for the first time in the latest Index on Censorship magazine. Vicky Baker speaks to him about its key theme of music as resistance

Writer Ariel Dorfman remembers the exact moment the idea first came to him for his latest short story, All I Ever Have. It was 7 January 1966, his wedding day. As dawn broke over Chile, an image came into his mind of a man in a military band, playing a defiant, rebellious song on his trumpet. Just seven years later General Augusto Pinochet would seize power.


Winter 2015: What’s the taboo?

Editorial: Talk does not cost lives, silence does
Ariel Dorfman interview: Writer unveils new short story lost after Chilean coup
The Music as Resistance playlist
Full contents of the winter issue
Subscribe to the magazine


“Perhaps because I was so full of the music of the day, the positive songs of betrothal, that counter-image visited me that morning,” Dorfman said from his current home in the USA, where he is soon to celebrate his golden wedding anniversary with his wife, Angelica. The words he hastily scribbled down that morning were lost in Chile’s 1973 coup, when he was forced into exile, having supported the ousted president Salvador Allende and worked as his cultural adviser.

But the image of the lone musician never went away. “Only recently, I understood how to write it,” he said. “It was not only about the man who plays the trumpet but about what stays behind him, how the singer may die but not the song.”

Dorfman has always been interested in music as a form of resistance. He remembers Ode to Joy, from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, being sung in the streets of Santiago as a protest against Pinochet. Groups would assemble outside prisons to sing over the walls, and inmates who survived the torture there later spoke of the strength it gave them. Dorfman’s 1990 play Death and the Maiden, which was first published in English in Index on Censorship magazine, tells of a sadistic doctor who rapes a political prisoner to the sound of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, known as Death and the Maiden.

“Death and the Maiden echoes the horror that the commanders of Nazi concentration camps adored Beethoven,” he said. “I have been reflecting for a long time on music as a meeting place with those who are our adversaries and even enemies. That music is a territory that we share with many whose views we disagree with.”

In All I Ever Have, one of the most powerful moments comes when the soldier quietly whispers “You are not alone” to the dissenting trumpeter, just out of earshot of the anonymous general. Dorfman said the moment was informed by his years writing about human rights and talking with victims of torture. “I am always moved by a moment – an almost invariable moment – when each of them [the victims] says that, in jail, or after having been tormented, they realise they are not alone, not only because there are other prisoners nearby, but because the guards suddenly change their attitude, the guards become wary, as if they know they are being watched. This solidarity is almost like a physical wave that can be felt by those in need. It’s as if we were sending songs to the injured and insulted of the world, and they hear the songs, they really do.”

You can read the Ariel Dorfman’s new short story, All I Ever Have, in the latest Index on Censorship magazine. Each magazine sale helps Index on Censorship fight for free expression worldwide. Order your copy here, or take out a digital subscription via Exact Editions (just £18 for the year).

You can also find Index on Censorships Music as Resistance playlist here

Ariel Dorfman’s latest novel in Spanish, Allegro, is narrated by Mozart in three crucial moments of his life (Editorial Stella Maris, November 2015)

From the archives: Behind the Sunglasses: Chile has done its best to forget its past

A march organized by the National Assembly of Human Rights in Santiago to mark the 40th anniversary of a military coup that ousted President Salvador Allende ended in violence and clashes with police. (Photo: Mario Tellez / Demotix)

A march organized by the National Assembly of Human Rights in Santiago to mark the 40th anniversary of a military coup that ousted President Salvador Allende ended in violence and clashes with police. (Photo: Mario Tellez / Demotix)

The date September 11 has a lot of meanings. For Chile, today marks 40 years since the coup that ushered in 17 years of military dictatorship. This powerful excerpt from Exorcising Terror: the Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet is taken from the winter 2005 edition of Index on Censorship magazine archives. 

By Ariel Dorfman

It must have been some time in 1974 when I think I first laid eyes on Maria Josefa Ruiz Tagle. She was a baby girl, and if I’m not mistaken she played on the floor of our kitchen in Paris with our son Rodrigo, who was then seven years old, while we chatted with her mother, Monica Espinoza. Angelica says that I am mistaken, that I could not have seen Maria Josefa then because Monica had not come to Europe at that point without her child – and yet that memory burns within me still. I had known Monica’s husband, Eugenio Ruiz Tagle Orrego, only vaguely, just a hello and good-bye a couple of times in the halls of our party’s headquarters (we both belonged to the same revolutionary organisation). Mutual friends keep on telling me that we must have met and talked any number of times, but I can’t for the life of me recall much else, other than trying to squeeze from the memory bag in my head one or two occasions in which we exchanged a joke or two; that’s all I remember of his life. His death, however, was another matter. A civil engineer who came from one of Chile’s most aristocratic families and a dedicated revolutionary since his student days at the Catholic University, the coup had found him in Antofogasta, in the north of the country, acting as general manager of the National Cement Works. He had voluntarily given himself up on 12 September, like so many who had trusted that the military would not defile or denigrate them – and had been killed a month or so later, reportedly in the most savage fashion.

A disturbing rumour had sprung up after his death: that his right-wing father in Santiago had taken his time in pressuring the military to release the wayward offspring, apparently because he thought that nothing much could happen to the young man, given the traditional civility of Chile’s armed forces, or maybe trusting that his son’s blue-blooded heritage would protect him. Which made it even more heartbreaking when his mother demanded that Eugenio’s tightly sealed coffin be opened and discovered his body and face mutilated almost beyond recognition. But I always wondered if these reports of his father’s guilty detachment and subsequent intolerable loss did not constitute a fabrication of the sort that often circulate in uncertain and violent times, an attempt by a repressed community to forge a story of how the murder of a rebellious son awakens a conservative progenitor to the true evil of a regime he helped to bring into being.

What was no fabrication, however, was how that death had devastated the family, and you could see it in the deep well of sorrow that Monica seemed to be floating in when we met her in Paris almost a year after the execution of her husband. And yet, at the same time, there was an unexpected purity in her gaze as I recall it, as if she had decided not to give fate the satisfaction of seeing her cry, as if all the tears had dried up inside her instead of coming out. Or was it a quiet resilience? – a decision she seemed to have made that she was going to get on with life, no matter how hard that might be, for the sake of the baby, but also in the name of her dead love, who would not have wanted the murder of his body to have murdered her future. So I was not entirely surprised when I heard, some months later, that she had settled into a stable relationship with Jose Joaquin Brunner, a friend of hers and Eugenio’s from way back. Brunner, whom I was also close to, was at the time working on his doctorate at Oxford and would become, upon his return to Chile a few years later with Monica and Maria Josefa, one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals. But perhaps more essential to Monica, Jose Joaquin grew into the role of Maria Josefa’s daddy, bringing her up as if she were his own child.

The little girl was told from her early age that her biological father, Eugenio, had died in front of a firing squad, but no other details were forthcoming. She conjured up, Maria Josefa wrote many years later, a sort of romantic scene – a death occasioned by a diffuse group of men, none of whom was identifiably responsible, perhaps a way of keeping that violence done to her father from overwhelming and poisoning her life, by not making her wonder about who was personally responsible for that homicide. She always sensed, nevertheless, that underneath the silence surrounding and covering that remote death, there lurked something more dreadful, some secret terror that was all the more fearful because nobody dared to name it. And then, one day, when she was twelve, a strange hunch led her to probe and explore what might lie behind a photograph in her grandmother’s house, a picture which showed Maria Josefa herself at around two years of age taking a bath in a small tub. Was it the clean water in which she was bathing in the picture that provoked her to undo the frame that held it and go beyond the false innocence of that child she had once been? Perhaps, because what she found were three pages hidden by her grandmother and written by two of her father’s friends who had witnessed the way he had been treated before he died, witnesses who had been tortured themselves but who had, by a miracle, survived instead of being killed by the Caravan of Death. Reading those words from the past, Maria Josefa found out that Eugenio had not been shot by a firing squad, but – to use her own words – ‘he was missing an eye. They had carved out his nose. His face was deeply burnt in many places. His neck had been broken. Stabs and bullet wounds. The bones broken in a thousand parts. They had torn the nails from his hands and from his feet. And they had told him that they were going to kill me and my mother’.

But she said nothing. She kept those words, those images, inside. Like the country inside. Like the country itself.

Many years later, in 1999, when she had Lucas, her first baby – at the age of 26, the age her father had reached upon his death – when she held the baby in her arms and realised that her father had also been able to hold her and get to know her, she burst into tears one morning and felt the irresistible need to write to her father, to tell her story, what it meant to be the child not only of a murdered man but of a country that did not want to confront and name that death. She denounced how everything around her had been built so she and everyone else would not have to look the past in the face. Built, she said, so that people would never have to go to sleep every night feeling afraid.

Still, however, she kept those intimate words to herself. Until, a year and a half later, in November 2000, when Eugenio’s body was exhumed from the Antofagasta cemetery and taken to the Wall of Memory in Santiago for a second burial. Then she allowed an actor publicly to read out, on that occasion, the words she had written to her father. For the tears that have been kept hidden all these years to come out, the tears that I had not been able to see when we sat with her mother Monica in that kitchen in Paris and I watched the fatherless child playing, for that to happen, first Pinochet had to be stripped of his immunity and Eugenio’s name had to be cleared – he was not a terrorist but a victim, he was not a criminal but a hero, and his death was terrible but had not been entirely in vain as it had come back to haunt the man who had ordered it. First Eugenio had to come back from the dead. Then his daughter could come out into the light of day.

But that is not the end of the story. When you drag something out from its hiding place, other things emerge, one thing leading to another. Eugenio Ruiz Tagle still had one more service to perform for his family and his friends and his country.

When Judge Guzman placed General Pinochet under house arrest at the end of January 2001, his lawyers immediately appealed – insisting that their client was innocent, that there was no proof that he had known about any of the deaths of the Caravan of Death. One week later, on February 7, the online newspaper El Mostrador (these sorts of journals are the only really free sites in Chilean print media) published the most damning document yet in the whole case. Back in 1973, Pinochet’s justice minister – probably because of Ruiz Tagle’s family connections – had informed the Commander in Chief of the Army of the young man’s torture and extrajudicial execution by the officers from the Caravan of Death. In his own handwriting, Pinochet answered the minister that he was to deny the facts and conceal them, instructing him to say: ‘Mr. Ruiz Tagle was executed due to the grave charges that existed against him. [Say that] there was no torture according to our information.’ Needless to say, any possible investigation into that death had been quashed.

This piece of news occasioned yet another revelation the next day in the same online newspaper. Carlos Bau, an accountant at the Cement Works where Eugenio had been general manager and who had given himself up to the authorities that same 12 September, told the story of Ruiz Tagle’s daily torture at the Air Force Base of Cerro Moreno in Antofagasta during the month that preceded his execution: the soldiers had wanted the prisoners to confess that they had weapons and explosives (Pinochet’s subordinates were trying to assemble a justification for the repression their commander in chief had unleashed, proof that there was a war and that the enemy was armed and dangerous). It turned out that, far from protecting him, Ruiz Tagle’s surnames had made his tormentors pick him out for special treatment – maybe to teach him a lesson, maybe because they had class resentments of their own, maybe because a Ruiz Tagle should have known better than to associate with the Allendista riffraff. Whatever the reasons, he was always the first to be beaten every time there was a session, constantly mocked and kicked and cut – and, like his wife a year later in Paris, like his daughter throughout most of her life, Eugenio had not let a cry out, had kept what was he was feeling inside. But Bau added one more detail that had not up until that moment been public knowledge in Chile: the identity of the officer who had started the beating, who had begun it all by landing Eugenio a kick in the genitals as an introduction to what was to await him in the days ahead. It was Lieutenant Herna´n Gabrielli Rojas. Who happened to be the present acting commander in chief of the Chilean air force. The same man.

‘Are you sure?’ the journalist asked Bau.
‘Absolutely sure.’

And in the next days, Bau’s identification was confirmed by several other witnesses. Herna´n Vera and Juan Ruiz and another victim, an officer called Navarro, who added that he had also seen Gabrielli torturing a 14-year-old boy.

General Gabriielli’s response on 12 February was not only to proclaim his innocence but also to announce that he was suing Bau and the others for libel – invoking a clause in the Law of National Security that shields a commander in chief from slander. The charges were subsequently dismissed (‘We weren’t slandering him,’ Bau said, ‘we were just telling the truth about him’) and, later in the year, in spite of ferocious resistance from the air force, Gabrielli was forced to step down from his post.

Another side effect of the trial of General Pinochet. And another lesson to be learned.

Because terror is not conquered in one revelatory flash. It is a slow, zigzag process, just like memory itself. Let me make myself clearer: I had read the name Gabrielli as the tormentor of Ruiz Tagle back in 1976 or 1977, when Carlos Bau arrived in Holland (where our family had just moved from Paris). He had already served three years of a 40-year prison sentence which had been commuted into 20 years of banishment. Carlos had no qualms in recounting his terrifying story – though what I recalled above all of that conversation afterward was an image that surged into my head and stayed with me through the years, my realisation that when somebody has been tortured it is as if for the rest of their life they will be wearing sunglasses behind their eyes.

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This article was originally published in the winter 2005 edition of Index on Censorship magazine.

Chile: TV journalist suspended for satirising Pinochet tribute

A Chilean TV journalist has been suspended after making satirical remarks about a tribute to the country’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet. After an interview with the tribute’s organiser Juan González, sports reporter Víctor Gómez said “we will wait for the smell of sulphur to dissipate” from the studio before launching into his programme on the channel Chilevisión. The reporter was not fired for his remarks, but has been warned against violating the channel’s editorial guidelines.