9/11, Pinochet and me
I naively thought I could absolve myself of the “original sin” of being born American by hearing the sob stories of people affected by US Foreign Policy.
While Al Qaeda operatives flew an airplane into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I sat alone in Santiago at La Universidad de Chile, staring out the window at some anti-American graffiti. “Yanqui, Fuera!” (Yankee, get out), it’s author enjoined, in large red letters painted on the side of the anthropology building.
My classmates, also students in my study abroad program, had stayed home that day at the advice of their host families. Disruptive protests and anti-American sentiment were expected, because September 11 is the anniversary of the 1973 coup.
On September 11, 1973, US-trained military operatives¹ helped remove the democratically-elected Chilean President, Salvador Allende (he favored socialist policies, had nationalized major businesses, and was considered a Cold-War threat in the Americas²). Allende supporters were rounded up to the national soccer stadium, where they were tortured and sometimes killed.
General Augusto Pinochet took Allende’s place as head of a governing junta. A debatably-valid election in 1980 gave Pinochet eight years in power. The democratically-elected Patricio Aylwin replaced him as President in 1991, after an estimated 80,000 people had been kidnapped and tortured under Pinochet’s leadership.
By the time the US participated in Chile’s coup, it had been toppling democratically-elected Latin American leaders for several decades, mostly to protect US foreign investment, although beating back Communism was the official reason.
I first learned about this at age eighteen, while reading David Halberstam’s The Fifties during the return leg of a pre-college cross-country road trip. Listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” and driving along Montana’s speed-limit-free highways, I counted hundred-car freight trains hurtling goods from coast to coast and fell in love with the majesty of my country. Until then, the United States had only appeared to me in history class at my New Haven, CT prep school. I dutifully learned dates and names and saluted the lofty goals of our founding fathers. Now I saw that the country was endless, and endlessly varied, and it seemed to be tamed only just enough for Walmarts to ensure that everyone, everywhere, could buy what they needed and most of what they wanted.
At night in Motel 6s, I read Halberstam’s tome on how we became the confident, productive entity we are. It includes the story of President Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, and the DC lobbyist for United Fruit, Tommy Corocan, concocting a 1954 coup to remove Guatemala’s President, Jacobo Arbenz³. His support for local workers threatened the banana industry. The Fifties was released in 1993, the year after Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize. Menchú is an indigenous Guatemalan activist campaigning against the human rights violations committed by armed forces during Guatemala’s ongoing civil war⁴. The country never got back on its feet after Arbenz’s removal.
My disgusted fascination with the coup in Guatemala led to a course on Liberation Theology, where I learned of the many countries where US dabbling tipped the scales towards civil war.
And so I arrived in Chile unsettled. As I saw it, tens of thousands of Chileans were detained, punished, and some were killed due to my own government’s dedication to protecting me.
Although I wasn’t yet born when the US helped Pinochet take and hold control, and I couldn’t yet vote as the US supported him through his final years in power, these things were done in my name.
This was the original sin of being born American. I came to Chile seeking absolution.
I thought I could clean my hands of this stain by getting close to the victims. More naïve still was the broad, impersonal lens with which I interpreted my experiences. I imagined I walked around Santiago with a “gringa” sign stuck to my forehead, believing every conversation to be drenched with my nationality and the fraught political history in Chile. I looked for a shared thread everywhere, trying to connect small, discrete interactions into a comprehensive narrative about democracy, lack thereof, and the long term impacts of US intervention in Latin America.
Six months prior to my Chile trip, I’d participated in what I’d now consider a successful absolution tour of El Salvador.
Along with classmates from my Liberation Theology course, I’d spent a week in a village in Guarjila, a province at the heart of El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s. A former Jesuit Priest, Andy, ran a clubhouse in the village⁵, which organized our trip.
We spent the days with villagers. My hostess, Lucy, taught me to roll corn flour into a sphere and then circle it in my hand while boring a hole into the center with my thumb until there was room to add queso fresco to the center and form the result into a pancake shape — a papusa. In the evenings, we had activities with the teenagers before walking home by flashlight (there was no electricity) and sleeping deeply in hammocks hanging in our hosts’ one-room homes. Some evening activities were purely fun, others more serious. A boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen told us about his three-month journey trying unsuccessfully to come to the US. On the most dramatic evening, some elders talked about their lives in the FMLN, the guerrilla group that fought US-funded paramilitaries.
By the time the week was up, our hearts had multiple times been broken by stories and reassembled by reminders that we were brave to come to El Salvador and learn about the ugly underbelly of US foreign policy.
I hope our conversations were cathartic and healing for the Salvadorans we met, because the lesson that I most absorbed was the part about me being good and brave by bearing witness to the pain. Andy was a true Jesuit, overflowing with love for everybody in all their foibles. I failed him.
When Andy was arrested the following year on trumped-up charges by a conservative government, I received a mass email from his (American college student) associate. It was one very long paragraph of a cry for help, pimpled and unbecoming with misspellings and run-ons, but I didn’t doubt it’s veracity. I could barely read it, and so I didn’t. Veronica, a Mexican-American friend who’d also been on the El Salvador trip, told me the email concluded in a request for money. We silently communicated our distaste. The request changed the currency of our relationship with Andy’s clubhouse from emotion and empathy to cash. Sending money would suggest that we’d paid for the compliments we received on our trip and not that we’d earned them.
If only I could tell myself, truthfully, that I sent no money because this was before Paypal and Venmo and it wasn’t easy to send money to El Salvador. But I’d learned that remittances (money sent from workers abroad) to El Salvador was the largest source of foreign capital in that country at that time. There would have been places an hour north, in San Francisco, all over the Mission District.
No. I had plenty of money. What I lacked was the good sense to conclude that sharing it was an appropriate way to face up to the fortunate happenstance of my birth in the US rather than El Salvador. And so I welcomed the news that Andy had been released, and psychically packed up memories of that trip into a box labeled “Social Activism in Latin America: College Years” where it sat, untouched, deep in my brain for years.
I retrieved those memories when stories of Salvadoran children caring for Salvadoran babies while soiling themselves in child detention centers at the US border first appeared. When I recalled the El Salvador trip from it’s storage spot, Chile climbed out with it, like one of my kids’ old velcro shoes that hadn’t been closed properly.
“Review me!” my Chilean memories shouted. “You’ve spent nearly two decades dismissing an entire country. We deserve another look, with a more mature eye.
“Fine”, I thought. “Let’s see what we have here.”
In August of 2001, I remembered, I was still operating on the assumption that the best thing I could do was drag people’s sob stories from them, feasting off of their sadness while expecting to be commended for my willingness to listen.
The Chileans weren’t having any of it.
Santiago lies as far south of the equator as San Francisco lies north of it. I arrived in early August: peak winter in a city without central heat. Chileans told me that an elderly person who survives August will live another year, a reference to the bone-chillingly wet cold that permeated the buildings and houses.
Nearly every day that month, I wore a patchwork quilted jacket that had belonged to my mother in the 1960s and a pair of jeans I bought at Diesel because I’d once seen a photograph of Mick Jagger wearing a similar pair. Under those things, I wore long underwear. And a t-shirt. And a long-sleeved shirt. And a sweater. And another sweater.
It quickly became a joke with my homestay family, “look at how many layers Sarita is wearing!” my host mother, Elena, would cry to her husband, Don Carlos, or son, Carlitos, each morning.
I tried to laugh along — how could I have come to Santiago so poorly prepared for the cold? But since finishing high school, I had become pleasantly accustomed to living outside the gaze of a meddling parent, and wished Elena would mind her own business. At night, I shivered sadly under heaps of blankets and hugged a hot water bottle Elena prepared for me. I regretted my decision to spend a semester in a country whose chill in the air was superseded, vastly, by what I perceived as the coldness of Chileans themselves.
The Chilean students at my host university, La Universidad de Chile, the liberal arts campus, crowded into the courtyard between classes, bundled in colorful woolen sweaters and coats, their necks kept toasty by soft, tasseled bandana-style scarves. They drank Nescafe and smoked, laughing and chattering quickly in an incomprehensible, staccato language that sounded nothing like the musical lilt I spoke in El Salvador. I watched from the sidelines, too shy even to buy a Nescafe, wondering whether it was reasonable to smoke just for the excuse of asking a potential friend for a light.
To put only a slightly exaggerated spin on things, the standard United States semester abroad goes (or went, in 2001) as follows: most students arrive at their new location, begin getting drunk that afternoon, ideally pick up a local significant other by the end of the week, and sober up only long enough to spend weekends traveling. Having treated prized landmarks like public urinals and missed most of their classes because those grades don’t matter, they return home with fond memories of all the things they did abroad that would be impossible to pull off in the US, some great pictures of themselves with an exotic looking love interest, and very little knowledge of their former host country other than which food stands are open when the bars close.
My plans for studying abroad were different. I seem to have expected someone to just walk up to me and include me in everything they and their friends did after that moment. Ideally, this person would be politically-minded, speak comprehensible slow and patient Spanish, and not be interested in a relationship (I had a boyfriend back home).
Unsurprisingly, by the time 9/11 happened, I was already failing miserably in my initial goals for studying abroad, because those goals were illogical. And so I grasped onto the attacks and the unpleasant interactions I had afterwards as reasons why I didn’t achieve the sense of place and camaraderie that I had hoped to find in Santiago. I’d only been in the city for five weeks when the towers went down, and I didn’t start speaking passable Chilean Spanish until at least ten weeks after that. It’s impossible to know what my study abroad experience would have been had the towers stayed standing, the attacks never happened, and I had the space to maneuver my way through a more mundane semester in Santiago.
Before the Al Qaeda attacks, I dedicated myself to collecting anecdotes related to Chile’s political history. My primary research site was my host family’s kitchen at a round, uneven table squeezed between the refrigerator and the hot water heater.
Elena’s grandson Javier, aged ten or twelve, visited after school. We snacked and looked at his history homework together. The textbook ended in 1973. Curious, I pointed it out to Javier, who turned to Elena. She responded with the confidence of a mother who’s answered similar questions from children for years, “A lot of people disliked Allende’s policies. In truth, so did I, but it wasn’t right to take away his Presidency.”
Mercedes, the girlfriend of Carlitos, picked at her avocado and toast, talking about her job at the mall. Her boss was General Pinochet’s daughter-in-law, and she’d complained that her children always struggled at school around the anniversary of the coup. Their classmates were mean to them.
Elena and Don Carlos seemed unmoved by the plight of the Pinochet grandchildren.
Given her employer, I assumed Mercedes was among the nearly half of Chileans who supported Pinochet. But one night when she and Carlitos were on the fritz, we sat in her apartment smoking pot and eating peanut butter-flavored puff snacks. She told me that In the early 80s, her older brother joined a university protest against Pinochet.
One day, he didn’t come home. Her family searched throughout the city. They called hospitals, the university, friends, family members.
Several days later, he turned up, uninjured.
He finished his coursework that year, but the university didn’t give him his degree. Without a degree, he couldn’t work in his field.
There was no explanation.
And then, in the late 1990s, his university issued the degree.
Again, there was no explanation.
That the withholding and ultimate relinquishing of his degree were shrouded in mystery were small reminders that Mercedes’s brother and his family had no control over their own lives.
At the time, I concluded that Mercedes’ ability to empathize with the Pinochet grandchildren was a sign of vapidness. Now it seems much more sophisticated: a cognitive dissonance born of her survival instinct. She needed a job at the mall. The powerful people who could give her the best-paying job happened to also be related to the people who briefly kidnapped her brother. So be it.
In early September, Elena and I sat together while I ate a lunch she’d prepared. The food was monochrome, somewhat cold, and joyless: a slice of fried meat, a boiled potato and rice.
Elena warned me to be careful getting around Santiago the following week. Tuesday, September 11 was the anniversary of the coup and the students would be in the streets, disrupting traffic as they protested for accountability on behalf of the people tortured and killed under the Pinochet dictatorship.
Then she told me about her own experience that day. In 1973, she lived in the same house I was then staying in, which was less than a block from Allende’s presidential palace. As she heard the sounds of military action down the street, she put her three children in the bathroom. She fed them sweets and distracted them with games all day, while playing the radio and worrying about her husband, who was at his job as a Physics professor (he was fine). Her children thought it was the best day ever.
I became grateful for my US citizenship. Our government may extend its tentacles to countries and issues it has no business messing with, but at least it protects us. By good fortune, the US has nothing akin to the rancid cloud of Pinochet’s legacy, I thought. In being born there, rather than here, I am a more joyful person.
The Chilean students who majored in English invited us out sometimes. In previous years, they’d done pretty well romantically with students from our program. When they spoke Spanish, they dropped “s”s, failed to use the informal plural “you” (vosotros), and diminutized everything by adding not just “ito(a)”, but “ititito(a)” to the end of words — all while insisting that the Queen’s English they studied was the only acceptable version of our language.
They took us to Blondie, a black-lit, cavernous club not filled to capacity. One of them told me that under la dictadura, his older siblings arrived at discotecas at 8pm, in time to be locked in until the nightly curfew ended after dawn the following day. He admired the length of the party and the magnitude of the commitment required to be there.
On September 10, my study-abroad classmate, Annie, and I arrived at the facultad to discover our classroom empty. Nobody there. No class held. Leaving campus, our eyes began to sting. The noise of a large crowd, perhaps hundreds of people, could be heard in the distance.
Soon, we were hiding our mouths and noses in our jackets, coughing as tears streamed down our face. It felt like someone was cutting a venomous onion.
Tear gas. The protesters several blocks away must have been tear gassed.
I was angry at how much it hurt.
But, to my own surprise, my anger wasn’t at the police who presumably released the tear gas.
It was at the protesters.
Democracy had returned to Chile more than a decade before.
What was so bad that they needed to cut school, which was heavily subsidized by the government, to go through so much physical pain a few blocks away? Why couldn’t they just use their vote to show their dissatisfaction? These were not people I related to.
The next morning, I sat alone in our empty Spanish classroom, annoyed that my classmates and teacher had apparently stayed home under the false cover of “avoiding the dangerous protests.”
I perched on a metal folding chair, at a similarly hollow and flimsy table, facing a pane-less window frame, looking at the graffiti on the building next door. In the cold, my breath rose and dissipated visibly, causing the words, “Yanqui, fuera! Fuera de Colombia!” to come in and out of focus.
The message, Yankee, get out! Get out of Colombia!, referenced Plan Colombia, the US policy of fighting the war on drugs abroad. US helicopters sprayed RoundUp over coca crops, leeching poison into the air breathed by the families of the farmers who were pressured into growing coca⁶ . US-financed paramilitaries killed and maimed campesinos and argued they’d killed guerrilla fighters⁷. I’d protested Plan Colombia the previous year. But as a yanqui, I felt the message directed hostility at me.
“Can you believe what’s happening?” Annie texted.
I envisioned her, along with the rest of our class, stuck on a bus near the centro. There must be a big protest, and I was going to miss the experience because of my punctuality. Goddamn it.
Then Annie called.
“Can you believe this?” She asked, drawing out her words like the Texan she is.
“What?” I walked to the window, stuck my head out and looked towards the centro, calculating how long it would take to get there and if the protest would still be going on.
“What?”
“What?” I was impatient now. “I’m sitting in class. Where is everyone?”
“You went to class? I’m watching the news at home. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
“What?”
Halfway into filling me in, she interrupted herself: “Whoa! Another one did. Another plane crashed into the other tower. Right now! They are showing — they are showing it on tv.”
There was a teachers’ lounge at the facultad where a thick 16-inch TV braced to the wall played BBC news. I stood in the doorway, watching footage of the second plane hitting the tower over and over again. To my left, a registrar’s assistant sat at a small desk. At least once, a teacher squeezed past me to enter the room and sit in a pleather orange chair.
I wished someone would say something to me. But my presence was so little acknowledged that I began to wonder if my body also lingered in the same liminal place between Santiago and New York as my mind did. Was I visible?
Annie and I decided we’d go to our afternoon class. It was in the Social Sciences campus downtown. Those students would know about the attacks. They’d be compassionate.
In class, a plane sounded above us. I waited, expectant. Was this the opening for condolences? After a pause, a student jumped under his desk, performing a cold-war bomb drill. Classmates laughed. Nobody looked at us. I’d have preferred to be obviously ignored rather than simply forgotten about.
A few weeks later, a photocopy appeared on a bulletin board outside that classroom.
It showed Bin Laden penetrating a smiling, vacant-looking George Bush from behind. A pre-social-media meme making its way through Santiago. Was this standard political humor, something that could easily have showed up on a US bulletin board, or something meaner? Did it matter that I wasn’t the intended audience?
On September 13, I flew to Bolivia for the week with Annie and some others. It was a holiday in Santiago. Fiestas Patrias. We took a bus to Lake Titicaca in the Andes, and then hired a boat to Isla del Sol.
Many of the boats around ours were surprisingly large and sturdy, because they were not standard Andean fishing boats, but the ships of the Bolivian Navy. In the 1880s, Bolivia lost 400 kilometers of Pacific Coastline to its bellicose neighbor, Chile⁸. It maintains a Navy optimistically, waiting for the day that they regain some coastline.
We sat up late drinking beer on an unfinished cement porch with a picnic table smelling of freshly-cut wood. The island had no electricity. The extreme darkness invited vulnerability.
For the first time, but not the last, I established a shared dislike of Chileans as a way to connect with a Latin American.
The owner of our hostel, a Bolivian man in his thirties, asked us tentatively, “Qué pasó en EEUU?” He worried about a friend who lived in Arizona. We assured this man that his friend was safe, and he assured us that we were good people. That God would punish our attackers.
In the La Paz airport, a Chilean businessman approached us. “These brown people, Bolivians,” he explained to us, “they are so lazy. So I have to travel here every few weeks to make sure work gets done.” I catalogued it in a nascent but growing list of reasons I could dislike Chileans.
Four professors held a public discussion about the World Trade Center attacks in late September.
As an attempt to understand Chilean attitudes towards the US and engage with them on their terms, I commend my younger self for attending. But I suspect I envisioned something like this: I walk into the room, my American vibe emanating from me like a Care Bear stare, pointing it at each panelist and then each attendee, gradually changing their hardened disgust at the US into a warm, expressive sympathy.
Walking along a paved footpath towards the building with the “Yanqui, Fuera!” graffiti on the side, I gazed up at it, hoping to see the message expanded with something against Al Qaeda and in support of New York.
The panel had already started when I arrived at the auditorium. It sat about 200 people — by far the largest Universidad de Chile classroom I ever saw — and was filled to overflowing.
At the door, I took off my Chilean-style jacket to flaunt a very un-Chilean top. My backpack bulged awkwardly with my coat inside. I shimmied through the crowd lingering in the back and advanced towards an available spot midway to the front, forcing myself past a couple of seated students on my way to the empty metal folding chair.
The tardy entrance, the overstuffed backpack that smacked the people around me, the aggressive journey to sit down were all hostile acts with plausible deniability. Once seated, I waited for people to begin staring at me, wondering what the gringa would think of this event. There were no such people. Several minutes passed before I collected myself enough to understand the panelists’ discussion.
A balding man sitting at the folding table on stage seemed to be talking at length about the symbolism of the Pentagon being taken out. Y el Pentágono, he bellowed, starting in a low tone and raising it a fifth halfway through. Long pause. The most important military building of a global power … the image of such a building in flames, seared in our memory … the symbol of capitalism, greed, wealth … He spoke for a long time. His monologue was very Latin American, darting into a tenuously-related point (who learned to fly planes in the very country they attacked…) before looping back to the Pentagon and then darting off in a different direction again.
I became very angry, silently. There was no apparent concern about the dead, their loved ones, or even the forthcoming fatalities of the future war that was assuredly on its way. The speakers weren’t engaging at all with the fact that these were personal tragedies as well as events that merited archetypal interpretations.
Had we done this to them? Were Chileans inured to the tragedies of 9/11 because they’d experienced such human brutality already?
I considered asking a question designed to expand the commentary beyond the symbolic: what about the innocence of the people in the towers or of the Afghans who would surely die if the US invaded? If the attacks were designed to encourage the US to withdraw from participation in global politics, did it matter that they would likely cause the opposite?
But I felt very unwelcome. It seemed to me that nobody in that room wanted to engage with a citizen of the country under discussion. The bloviating on the stage described a fictional US that the speakers and audience preferred. It was perhaps a more satisfyingly poetic story or maybe it described a more deserving outlet for their disgust.
I stood up again, reversing the disruptive trip from the door that I’d just completed. Although it was still early in my study abroad program, I was done with La Universidad de Chile.
Carlitos sat with me in the kitchen as I debuted my new theory about the attacks.
He was twenty-seven, finishing a degree in computer science, and living with his parents, as was customary for unmarried adult Chileans. He wore a shapeless wool sweater from Chiloe, an island in the far south, near Antarctica. A wooden cutting board lay between us, carrying crackers, some thin slices of cheese, and avocado mashed to a pulp, heavily salted, and browning. It was early evening, and we were probably drinking milky tea.
I was making the case that Americans now shared a new bond with Chileans — that of being victims. Since the World Trade Center attacks, I could empathize more deeply with Chileans. Perhaps we even had something in common, this experience of terror. Sneakily, I was testing my hypothesis that 9/11 absolved us of what we’d done to Chile.
“Think of all the children whose papis left for work and never came home. The cars of dead people who commuted to las torres still sitting unclaimed in New Jersey train station parking lots.
“How many people died in the Estadio Nacional?” I asked him. “Around 3,000, right?”
Carlitos didn’t know. He called to Elena in the next room, “Mamí, cuánta gente murió en el estadio nacional?”
“Más que en las torres!” Came her reply: “more than in the towers!”
Evidently, she’d also done the math, also considered how the Al Qaeda attack measured up against the coup.
She’d concluded the 9/11 death toll was too low.
In October, four of us from our exchange program decided to go to hot springs a few hours outside the city. Our host families were worried about us. We hadn’t traveled much. We didn’t stay out until dawn and sneak in reeking of cigarettes and piscola. Nobody had fallen in love with a Chilean.
There was some confusion about how to get there. We took a bus, got off too soon, then hitchhiked.
A man in a red car picked us up. There were no seatbelts. The seat cover in the back was very thin fabric, and slashed in the middle. Drying yellow foam peaked out of it, rubbing into the back of my jeans.
Tania, the designated chit chatter, sat up front. Her mother was Argentine so her Spanish was fluent. Also, she had a vibe that was both inviting and offbeat. Outcasts loved her. A geeky bachelor in her homestay apartment building once left a note under her door framed as a multiple choice question, with boxes next to each possible answer: Would you like to go out with me? Yes / No / Maybe.
The man’s vowels trended towards a long “e” — strong chilean accent — and everything he said came to me as one single strand of confusion. But when I heard him say “las torres” I knew what he was asking about and I readied my typical comments:
I used to live in New York. I was about a kilometer from the towers.
It’s hard to be far away from home while my country is sad.
I don’t agree with President Bush. I’m a bit scared to go home. I don’t think we should invade Afghanistan. I don’t want a national ID.
Yet the man didn’t seem interested in listening. He asked nothing about what might happen in the US. He was not curious if we’d lost anyone.
As his car wound up the hill through the woods, the man shared his rendition of the towers falling down, as if recounting a scene from his favorite action movie. The terrorists beheading stewardesses and the airplanes flying straight into the biggest buildings in New York and the world. He chuckled to himself. “Si pecas, pagas” he told us in conclusion. If you sin, you pay.
Tania reacted immediately, saying something like “here’s good. We’ll get out here,” despite his protests that we weren’t there yet.
We wordlessly walked back down the mountain to the bus stop. We’d return home to our host families, smile and lie and say we had an excellent trip to the hot springs. It was too humiliating to confess that we refused to accept a ride from a man who wanted to tell us how awful our wounded country was.
A couple of cars drove by, honking offers to pick us up. But there was no question among us that we wouldn’t accept any more rides from Chileans that day.
“I hate it here,” Tania finally said. “I want to go home.”
Victor Jara was a beloved folk singer who composed the theme song of President Salvador Allende’s political campaign and who was tortured and killed in the Estadio Nacional.
Carlitos and Mercedes brought me to an annual concert held in his memory at the same stadium. On the way, they prepped me with Jara’s story. Rounded up on September 12, 1973, he had his hands and wrists broken almost immediately, but he responded “I still have my voice”, so they shot him.
When I told my father this story, he rolled his eyes and said, “That’s from Shakespeare.” But Wikipedia agrees with Carlitos and Mercedes⁹. A soldier stomped on Jara’s hands and wrists, breaking them, and then taunted him to play music. He responded by humming Venceremos (We Will Triumph), Allende’s campaign song.
He had more than 40 gunshot wounds when his dead body was hung outside the Estadio Nacional before being tossed in the streets.
Waiting in the security line to enter the concert, I noticed the silhouetted skyline of pre-9/11 New York decorating small bright-colored flyers blowing through the crowd.
The flyers advertised a local indie film about Chileans living in New York.
I handed a flyer to Carlitos, commenting on las torres. “They’re not there anymore. I don’t like seeing them on the flyer.” Carlitos shrugged, which strikes me today as the appropriate response, but I was agitated.
The film advertised a false New York.
This Chilean filmmaker had taken ownership of my country’s greatest city, molding it to fit their story and then selling it as their art, even as their compatriots denigrated me for my citizenship.
That agitation is familiar to me now; it’s shown up again. I felt a similar protectiveness and jealousy when, red plastic cup with cheap wine in one hand and flip phone in the other, I spoke with a Spanish friend chanting “Ganamos, ganamos” (“we won! We won!”) upon Barack Obama’s Presidential victory. I may have sneered “You didn’t win, Americans did” aloud in response. I certainly did in my head.
My friend was like many of my international classmates at the time: they rooted for Obama for President; they wanted Obama’s policies to win (so did I). They were disgusted by Obama’s opposition, so they dismissed it.
When I hate something about my country, I hate it with the tender sadness of someone who knows the object of my contempt can do better. I found my classmates’ views two-dimensional and incomplete. I would have preferred they be perplexed, curious, and open to the possibility that they didn’t understand the full story.
You can’t understand the gun debate unless you relate to our die-hard dedication to autonomy or you understand our love affair with the history of the Wild West, I find myself saying, surprised to be defending the NRA.
Or, you can’t appreciate why our healthcare system is so entrenched with business without understanding the weird history of healthcare becoming a work benefit when wages were frozen while the US came to the aid of Europe during World War II¹⁰.
Finally, unable to find the words to explain the 400 years of history that I’ve spent my forty years learning experientially, I prefer to close off the debate, wrap myself in the cloak of Americanness and shut out others who think they know something about my country just because they read the news or follow pop culture.
On my utopian days, I can accept that New York is a thousand-sided shape, with each side available to different people. The Chilean film from the Victor Jara concert presents one tiny side, and the New York in that film may be idealized for the Chilean audience (as I originally thought), but it could also be a realistic depiction of the New York that expat Chilean twenty-somethings know. A New York I don’t know.
On less forgiving days, I want everyone to shut the hell up and accept that they don’t understand my country. I know I don’t.
Countless taxi drivers, considering me an ally, have confided to me that they want to be allowed to vote in my elections because the outcomes affected them. I disagree, but reluctantly. With the stroke of a pen, my President can change the balance of power in my taxista’s democracy from the populist leader to the pro-US semi-authoritarian. Who am I to say if that’s more or less important than the fact that the person in the Oval Office would also decide what my healthcare system looks like and whether my neighbor can buy guns?
Years passed. I finished college, moved to Peru to run the country office for an international research nonprofit, got into the Harvard Kennedy School’s International Development program.
When I arrived at Harvard, I became friends with a Chilean former rock star named Javier.
In the fall of 2008, Javier and I partnered in a big class project. While the two of us sat in the library running statistical regressions and building power points, Lehman Brothers imploded and AIG was bailed out.
A black market of Xanax materialized. Students from countries that don’t require prescriptions for the anxiety medication passed their pills to the rest of us. We were terrified of leaving the Harvard bubble with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and no job, and we needed help sleeping at night.
Javier chuckled. In Chile, we lose all our savings every decade or so. Americans were so thin-skinned, worrying too much about our financial institutions, our savings, our careers. He could have pointed out that if Americans had been less fearful of losing investment, we might not have supported so many democracy-toppling coups across Latin America in the late 20th century, but he didn’t.
Javier also thought my experience in Chile was funny. And unfair to Chileans. Poor Chile, he argued, its reputation damaged by an unusual confluence of events. At the campus where I studied, you couldn’t ash your Lucky Strike cigarette without hitting at least two communists, he pointed out. Plus, I was there at a time when US vulnerability showed in a way it never had before.
Come back to Santiago with me, Sarita, he assured me. You will love it.
On Halloween, Javier brought a Chilean friend to a party at my apartment. The atmosphere among US and international students alike was ebullient. Barack Obama would be elected President later that week, a feat interpreted as such a victory over endemic US racism that it would garner him the Nobel Peace Prize. We expected him to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, to end our military presence in the Middle East, to preside over the evaporation of endemic racism. The US was rounding a corner.
Javier’s friend, Pancho, was balding and round. Javier introduced us, mentioned I had studied abroad in Santiago, and went to get a drink. Pancho asked me how I liked the city, smiling. I imagined the conversation template he thought was in play. He wanted to hear me praise the Chilean people, the nightlife, the barbeques in La Parque Reina, day trips to Valparaiso and the hiking so far south you could see Antarctica. A nostalgic conversation that would end with us talking about how Chilean pisco is far superior to Peruvian pisco.
“I didn’t like it very much,” I told him. “The towers went down while I was there. I found Chileans to be really mean about it. There was a lot of anti-americanism.”
I expected a repeat of my conversations with Javier. An apology, a laugh, an explanation that I had met an unrepresentative sample of Chileans. But our conversational tennis was doomed.
“Of course there is a lot of anti-americanism,” he said, speaking in a lower register than he had at our introduction, “Look at you guys! 300 million people and nobody says anything.” Nadie dice nada.
“Nobody says anything? I marched, I protested Iraq. I voted for Gore, for Kerry.”
He shook his head sadly.
I’d regret dumping my backlog of emotion on Pancho if I thought it affected him, but he stood blankly as I yelled to be heard over the music. Fuera! I shouted, adopting the word graffitied on the side of the anthropology building. You can’t come in here and tell me — criticize me. At least I cared. You want to yell at an American? Go to fucking Texas. Yell at them. Yell at the people who voted for Bush. Get the fuck out of my apartment. Fuera. Fuera. Fuera.
Pancho did not leave. He decided to continue enjoying my party, sipping my rum and coke from a large red plastic cup and chatting with my friends. In my crimped hair and “Weird New Jersey” t-shirt (it was a last minute costume, as a “Bon Jovi fan”), I pushed the interaction out of my mind and returned to the business of hostessing. My roommate, an ethnic Punjabi born in the UK, played Estelle’s “American Boy” several times that night.
My Iraq war protest would not have met Pancho’s definition of “saying something.”
In early 2003, my college housemates and I drove from Palo Alto to San Francisco to wave signs outside City Hall along with what seemed like half of the Bay Area.
We sat on blankets and drank beer, passed around a blunt or two, offering them to the strangers on the blankets next to ours. Someone read Barbara Boxer’s letter explaining her vote supporting the Iraq invasion and we all booed. A small child spoke about how she didn’t want a war. I wondered how much foreign policy weight we should give a third grader.
At one point, a friend asked where our missing roommate, Jeremy, was. The concern was that he’d failed to coordinate a ride, and was wandering around campus trying to get to the city.
After a delay, someone pointed out Jeremy wasn’t coming. Jeremy’s father was a known pro-war political figure. I wonder whether we’d forgotten who Jeremy was, or maybe we’d forgotten the purpose of this pleasant picnic with strangers. We had forgotten one of the two.
If Jeremy had been there, and if the person on the stage had been not a child but the Black Eyed Peas, the protest would have been identical to the Coachella music festival, which I attended with the same crowd a few months later.
My experience at the protest notwithstanding, I was strongly against invading Iraq. I just couldn’t imagine anything my generation could do to stop the steamroll leading up to Donald Rumsfield’s “shock and awe” campaign. This was only two years after the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to George W. Bush, which I interpreted as a big middle finger to real democracy in favor of the appearance of democracy. So instead of thinking seriously about stopping the Iraq invasion, I accepted it and mourned. Driving down I-280 from Berkeley to Palo Alto listening to the post-battle ballad from Les Miserables, “Empty Chairs and Empty Tables”, I found myself sobbing one afternoon. I was alive, sentient, and old enough to vote. This military action was definitely on me. How could we (the US) keep doing this?
Only in revisiting these memories now have I realized how optimistic Pancho’s criticism was, compared with my own approach to US foreign policy. He thought people like me could actually have stopped Iraq — or Pinochet — and so our failure to do so meant we weren’t trying hard enough. I thought the tear-gassed Chilean protesters on September 10, 2001 were malcontents, expecting too much from their government. Perhaps I was overly pessimistic in believing they should take what was offered them with gratitude and move on.
My father has strong opinions about collective guilt.
He rejects it entirely.
If he gave collective guilt even a sliver of a chance, he says, he would be overcome with hatred towards all Germans (he’s Jewish).
In his world, then, my guilt-driven trips to El Salvador and Chile were pointless because I played no direct part in the actions for which I sought absolution. These days, I also tend to think that guilt as a motivating factor is overrated. But I do believe I have a responsibility to repair sins committed in my name. Whether or not the transgressions actually helped me may be irrelevant.
The US defended its role in Latin American violence as being for my benefit. I am now among the fortunate few who can vote for or against policies with similar implications, as the US continues to bully the smaller countries around us. I continue to have an obligation to understand the long term impacts of these policies, to make informed decisions about what I want our government to do in the long run. Forget absolution. Enter prevention of future sins.
By the time I got to Chile, It had been nearly 30 years since the 1973 coup, and it’s been an additional two decades since then. During those years, Pinochet was tried for war crimes, and acquitted, by a Judge who voted against Allende in 1970 and supported Pinochet in the 1989 election. Two Chileans have been tried and convicted for Victor Jara’s death in the Estadio Nacional¹¹. During COVID, Javier shared a picture of him and his wife with our WhatsApp group, wearing sheer plastic full-face masks, celebrating Chile’s new constitution in a massive party in downtown Santiago¹².
Shortly afterwards, in mid January 2020, another meme made its way to our WhatsApp group: on the left, a white man with shaggy brown hair and a crown of thorns, beaten and bleeding, labeled “United States”. On the right, a separate image: a chubby brown man (apparently a recognizable South Asian comedian), sitting in a movie theater entranced and eating popcorn joyfully, labeled “The Rest of the World.”
The sport of watching the US implode has now become a renowned global phenomenon.
So Chile’s stock has risen and our stock has fallen. But Americans, myself included, who long to consider this chapter of US history closed — diminished by the passage of time and the token legal action that has been taken — would be incorrect to do so. The US has simply changed playgrounds and chosen different tools. Half a million people¹³ have died since the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the World Trade Center attacks.
We have learned nothing, and our memory is so short that almost nobody recognizes the connection between US tampering with Latin American countries and the swarms of families from Central America arriving at our borders today, trying to escape violence in their countries¹⁴. It’s not much different from 9/11, when we refused to consider the irony of being attacked on our soil by former rebel fighters we helped arm against the Soviets in the early 80s. If we don’t continue to think and talk about the political violence our country has financed with the goal of ending it, we will pass on this original sin to our children and our children’s children ad infinitum.
When I reflect on the Chileans who treated me as an emissary of the US State Department from 1973, I am reminded of theories of trauma, in which we are doomed to relive our experiences until we’ve resolved them in a satisfactory way.
If the Chileans lashing out at me had fantasized about making Americans feel some of the senseless pain that the US helped cause Chileans, then maybe they carried out his fantasy through my presence. They could move on. And, having received their contempt and been forced to reckon more painfully with my own preconceptions about them, so could I. It wasn’t quite absolution, but it wasn’t far from it, either.
Fuera.
References
- The Pinochet File, wikipedia
- Wikipedia reference
- google books
- Wikipedia reference
- Link to Tamarindo Foundation
- Wikipedia reference
- Wikipedia reference
- Wikipedia reference
- Wikipedia reference
- NY Times
- London Review of Books
- NY Times
- Reference Friends Committee on National Legislation
- The journalist Jonathan Blitzer is working on a book about this
