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Writing Toward Hope

The Literature of Human Rights in Latin AmericaBy Marjorie Agosin

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2007 Yale University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10942-9

Introduction

Certain dates have permanent significance in the cultural and historical imagination of the Americas. One is September 11, 1973, the day the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was toppled by Chilean military forces, backed by the intervention of the CIA. Peter Kornbluh's book The Pinochet Files (2003) is the most effective proof of this dark moment in U.S. policy toward Chile. Relevant documents have finally been opened for scrutiny so that we may begin to understand what happened. For many Chileans it is impossible to forget that spring morning in Santiago when all radio programs were interrupted with military marches, and the city skies filled with black smoke from the bombing of La Moneda, the national palace where President Allende governed and gave his last and moving speech, in which he said, "History is made by the people." That day's attack was unprecedented in Chilean history, and it interrupted for seventeen years what had been one of the Southern Hemisphere's most stable democracies. In Allende's place, the coup installed dictator Augusto Pinochet and a military junta that controlled the country through fear and silence.

Almost a million Chileans chose or were forced to live in exile in foreign countries where they longed for the uncertain return-because once you abandon your native country, the return is never the same. Both the individual and the country change within the convoluted political history of nations. Many Chileans disappeared in broad daylight during the military regime. Others were forcibly dragged from their homes to never return. Torture became common practice, but it was always secret, and the torture centers like Villa Grimaldi and Londres 22 are part of the everyday language of Chile today.

Villa Grimaldi was in its heyday a beautiful park filled with Chilean and European fauna and flora. Then the villa was mysteriously abandoned by its owners and became a sinister torture and detention center. It is difficult to obtain testimony from those who were detained there because what happened is too painful to remember and few survived their stay. Villa Grimaldi is now a memorial park called El Parque del Recuerdo. Visitors walk along the same paths where many Chileans were subjected to infamous treatments.

Gladys Daz Armijo, one of the authors included in this anthology, was tortured at Villa Grimaldi and today she shares her experience with us. Hers is one of very few texts written by an imprisoned and tortured woman. The clarity of her language conveys the pain of putting into words the most degrading acts imaginable.

During the 1970s, some of Chile's neighbors-Uruguay and Argentina-were also subjected to military dictatorships; during the 1960s Brazil endured the same. In the 1980s El Salvador and Nicaragua suffered a resurgence of authoritarian regimes. Anastasio Somoza was removed from office in Nicaragua and briefly replaced by a socialist government, inspired by the government of Salvador Allende.

Regardless of the fact that Latin America and its inhabitants were colonized by Europeans and continue to be "colonies" under the dominion of twentieth-century foreign economic doctrines, the 1970s are of utmost importance in understanding Latin America's present as well as its possible future. Chile's case sheds light on what happened in the region from the 1970s until the early 1990s. Allende represented the possibility of building a humanistic socialism through peaceful means and outside the Soviet sphere of influence. The greatest threat his government had to face stemmed from the fact that it had been elected democratically and thus created a predecent many wished to erase. In Argentina and Uruguay, military governments arose and destroyed the democratic presence in the Southern Cone. They united forces through Operation Condor, which allowed them to stay in power for almost two decades. If Allende's government had allowed people to hope, Pinochet's regime did the opposite; it defeated a dream. As Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman affirmed, Allende was an impossible dream, but Pinochet did not even allow people the possibility of having a dream.

In the 1980s, President Reagan's government unleashed an anti-Communist campaign in Nicaragua and El Salvador, supporting paramilitary groups that continued to disseminate violence, forced disappearances, and condoned massacres, like the one in El Mozote, where military forces assassinated more than eight hundred people. Latin America's turbulent history is filled with disappearances, graves without names, and concentration camps, but it is also a history of hope, of building peace, of courage and the power of words to retell events and bear witness to political violence and the disappearance of a whole generation of idealistic youth.

Although the military dominated most of the Southern Cone's mass communication services, visual artists, poets, and writers defied the culture of fear through their creativity and passion for telling others about the governments that repressed them. Writers, artists, and moviemakers documented with tenacity and honesty what was happening in their respective countries.

Filmmaker Miguel Littin produced the extraordinary documentary Battle of Chile, a six-hour epic filled with the testimony of workers and students punished for their political convictions. Two decades later, another filmmaker, Patricio Guzmn, created a historical memoir of a forgotten generation and interviewed those who had supported Salvador Allende and his government. Ariel Dorfman, from exile in the Netherlands, wrote poems and an allegorical novel, Widows, dealing with the imperious need to bury the dead. Jacobo Timerman wrote his memoirs while imprisoned outside Buenos Aires. In Mexico, Elena Poniatowska gathered the testimonial voices of students and spectators at the massacre of Tlatelolco as well as describing the extreme poverty people experience in the outskirts of Mexico City.

Literature gained a sense of urgency and became vital, an act of courage and denunciation, of resistance and hope. At the same time, it achieved the necessary presence to deny the complicity of silent societies, submersed in fear and indifference. As the repressive apparatus controlled the history of these countries, it also censured the education of children, the books that could be published or read, the right to vote, and the right to choose certain college careers. Throughout Latin America, writers creatively and peacefully counteracted the culture of fear through art. The words of poets became weapons; theirs were powerful voices that were not silenced in the prisons or torture centers but fought to retain their humanity in a dehumanized world. Literature armed faith, feeling, and believing. Moreover, art attempted by other means to defy censure, to trick the military that read poetry and arbitrarily determined which texts were deemed dangerous.

Chilean women from various social strata formed an action group motivated by social justice since people were being terrorized by the propaganda machine operated by the dictatorship. Women for life and against the culture of death, they were known in Argentina as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo; in Chile as the Asociacin de Detenidos y Desaparecidos; and in El Salvador as Las Comadres. These women-citizens, mothers, and workers-decided to make...