8
üiäxß
street roots
street roots
O ct 11, 2013
O ct 11, 2013
9
if he talked, I was doomed. I needed to get
o u t My husband and I made the decision
together: I would leave immediately.
I had a valid passport I left the country
openly, alone. It was not unusual: Thousands
were leaving at that time. I went to
Venezuela, and a month later, when it
became obvious that it would be risky for
me to return to Chile, my husband left with
our two children. We all reunited in Caracas,
[Venezuela,] where we lived for 13 years.
Buried
freedom
O.H.iAfrw than 3,000 people were killed in
Chile, and many more simply disappeared.
Were people aware of the horror at the time?
I.A.: I’m sure that most people were aware.
I certainly was, and so were all my friends.
However, many people managed to, or
pretended to, ignore the violence and
corruption of the dictatorship.
I was in Chile in 2003, during the
30th anniversary of the military coup. By
then all the information about the
massacres, the torture, the hidden mass
graves, etc., had been published extensively;
there were many public ceremonies to
honor the victims. And still some people
denied the facts.
Forty years after the military coup
in Chile, author Isabel Allende
remembers the paralyzing fear
that swept the county.
BY OLE HOFF-LUND
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
hilean author Isabel Allende won
worldwide acclaim when her
bestselling first novel, “The House of
the Spirits,” was published in 1982. In
addition to launching Allende’s career as a
renowned author, the book, which grew out
of a farewell letter to her dying grandfather,
also established her as a feminist force in
Latin America’s male-dominated literary
world. The novel, which details the lives of
two families living in Chile from the 1920s
to the country’s military coup in 1973, has
been described as both a family saga and a
political testimony.
She has since written nearly 20 more
works, including “Eva Luna,” “Island
Beneath the Sea” and “Paula.” Allende’s
books, all written in Spanish, have been
translated into more than 30 languages and
have sold more than 57 million copies. Her
latest novel “Maya’s Notebook” was
published in April.
A prominent journalist for Chilean
television and magazines in. the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Allende’s life was altered
when Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a military
coup in 1973 that toppled Chile’s socialist
reform government. Allende’s cousin,
Salvador Allende, elected Chile’s president
in 1970, died in the coup. The Pinochet
regime was marked early on by repression
and brutality, and Allende became involved
with groups offering aid to victims of the
regime. Ultimately finding it unsafe to
remain in Chile, she fled in 1975 with her
husband and two children. The family lived
in exile in Venezuela for the next 13 years.
Since 1987, Allende has made her home
in San Rafael, Calif., with her second
husband, attorney and author William
Gordon, and their extended families.
Allende became a U.S. citizen in 1993.
C
Ole Hoff-Lund: How did you learn the first
signs that Augusto Pinochet was staging a
military coup against Salvador Allende?
Isabel Allende: People were talking about
the possibility for some time, but it was a
vague rumor that nobody quite believed.
Salvador Allende, however, was convinced
that there was a real threat and that the
CIA was behind it. Chile had such a long
and solid democratic tradition that the idea
of military intervention was almost
unthinkable, so Allende’s fears seemed
exaggerated. Certainly nobody thought that
Augusto Pinochet would become a traitor.
The first news that Pinochet was involved in
the coup came on S ep t 11.
O.H.: Pablo Neruda (politician and Nobel
Laureate poet who died shortly after the coup)
was a symbol of the opposition, and his
funeral marked the first protest against the
military coup. How do you remember that
day?
IA.:Pablo Neruda’s death (on SepL 23,
1973), which deserved a national day of
O.H.: How did Pinochet hold on to power for
17 years?
I.A.: Fear is a very powerful tool, and
Pinochet used it successfully. He controlled
the military, the judiciary, and there was no
Congress; there was no freedom of the
press, no habeas corpus, no right to dissent.
He imposed an economic system that
seemed successful at the beginning,
although it benefited the capitalists while it
maintained the labor force under an iron
fist. The gap between the very rich and the
poor in Chile is still shameful.
As time went by, Pinochet’s support
dwindled, and eventually the opposition was
able to defeat him in the polls. But I always
keep in mind that thousands of people cried
for him at his funeral!
O.H: The criminal cases against Pinochet
never concluded. What is — in your eyes — the
explanation?
I.A.: Pinochet was protected by the amnesty
that he himself created, by his status as
senator-for-life, by his connections and,
especially, by the military. I believe that
they didn’t really want Pinochet to face trial;
they delayed everything to give him time to
die in peace, in his bed.
O.H.:ifow close was your relation with
Salvador Allende [and, looking back,] how do
you view his political work and ideas?
mourning, was ignored by the dictatorship.
His house in Isla Negra had been searched
by the military, and his house in Santiago
was broken into by the security forces
during his wake. The word of his funeral got
around, and people gathered to accompany
his remains to the cemetery.
We knew that it was dangerous. The
military government tried to make sure that
there would be no political demonstrations
during the ceremony. But short of shooting
everybody, it was impossible to stop people
from reciting Neruda’s most revolutionary
poems or chanting slogans and protest
songs.
We walked several blocks to the tomb
where Neruda’s coffin would be temporarily
placed. His wish was to be buried in his
house in Isla Negra, looking at the Pacific
Ocean, the place he loved the most in this
world. At the beginning there were a few of
us, and we were afraid of the soldiers, but
as we walked, more and more people joined
in and we started feeling stronger. The
mood of the crowd shifted. Somebody
began singing, another shouted Neruda’s
name, then Allende and (musician Victor)
Jara... It became very emotional and also
scary. The soldiers were anxious, nervous;
they didn’t know what to do. I could see
their fingers on the triggers, their jaws
tense. It was a lovely spring day, and as we
approached the cemetery; people poured in
from the adjacent streets, crying, singing,
hugging each other.
That day we buried not only the poet, we
buried Allende, Jara and hundreds of other
victims. We buried our democracy, and we
buried freedom.
O.H.: What was the atmosphere like in
Santiago after the coup?
I A .: Those who supported the dictatorship
celebrated the death of Allende with
champagne. They justified everything,
including torture. It would take several
years for them to realize the extent of the
brutality and question the dictatorship, but
some supported Pinochet to his very last
day.
In 1973 and 1974 the atmosphere among
the people I knew — students, journalists,
intellectuals, artists, workers, etc. — was
very somber. We were scared, almost
paralyzed by fear. Most people didn’t want
to get in trouble, just go on with their lives
in a quiet way, keeping a low profile.
There was almost no information, only
rumors. We heard about torture centers,
concentration camps, assassinations, raids
in poor neighborhoods, how thousands were
arrested and many more had fled the
See ALLENDE, page 9
Demonstrators hold
up images of their
relatives, who were
victims o f human
rights abuse during
the former General
Augusto Pinochet
years, in front of
the “La Moneda”
Presidential Palace
during a rally in
Santiago Sept. 11.
P H O T O B Y R EU TER S/
IV A N A L V A R A D O
ALLENDE, fro m page 8
country, but there was no way of confirming
these rumors. We feared that the phones
were tapped and that many people had
become informants, so we were cautious
when we spoke, even within the extended
family. Some of us got involved in helping
fugitives; it was impossible to refuse help to
those who needed a place to hide. At the
beginning we were not aware of how serious
the consequences could be.
For a tourist at that time in Chile, this
terror was not apparent. The tourist would
find himself in a clean city, with almost no
urban crime; he would m eet polite and
meek people; and he would conclude that
Chile was a very organized country. Even
the children marched to school quietly in
their uniforms! The tourist would see police
everywhere and soldiers in combat gear and
would be a little bored, because of the
curfew, but otherwise he would enjoy the
country. I could not live in such a place. I
didn’t want to live in fear, and I didn’t want
my children to grow up in a dictatorship.
O.H.: Were you harassed because of your
family ties?
I.A.: I was a journalist, and my name made
me rather visible. I was a feminist, a leftist
and a relative of Salvador Allende, three
"We feared that the
phones were tapped and
that many people had
become informants, so we
were cautious when we
spoke, even within the
extended family. Some of
us got involved in helping
fugitives; it was
impossible to refuse help
to those who needed a
place to hide. At the
beginning we were not
aware of how serious the
consequences could be."
P H O T O B Y LO R I B A R R A
reasons for the military dictatorship to keep
me under surveillance. I was fired from all
my jobs, but I didn’t think I was in danger
until the beginning of 1975. But I was very
unhappy in Chile, and my husband and I
made plans to leave. It was very hard
because we had no money, no connections
and nowhere to go. We waited, hoping that
soon the military would go back to their
barracks, and we would have democracy
again.
O.H.: Did a specific experience convince you to
flee?
I.A.: Several things happened in a single
week that made me panic. I discovered that
a new friend was really an undercover agent
of the feared secret police. A relative who
worked for the government let us know that
I was on a blacklist and could be taken at
any m om ent A person whom I had hidden
in our house was arrested, and I knew that
LA.: Salvador Allende was my father’s
cousin. In Chile, that makes me his niece.
My father left my m other when I was so
young that I have no memories of him, but
Salvador Allende remained close to my
mother.
Salvador Allende had the dream of
transforming Chile into a country where
justice and equality would prevail. He
wanted profound reforms, a peaceful and
democratic revolution. He was way ahead of
his time. In the 1970s the world was divided
by the Cold War, and the United States was
determined not to allow any Latin American
country to follow the steps of Cuba. The
CIA intervened from the very beginning to
topple Allende’s government. The political
parties of the Chilean right were willing to
destroy the country if that was the price
they had to pay to get rid of Allende’s.
Socialist dream.
O.H.: Will the wounds ever heal in Chile?
I.A.:Yes; all wounds heal in time. Forty years
have gone by since the ... coup, and soon
Pinochet will be just a name to frighten
children in bedtime stories.
Reprinted from Real Change Newspaper,
Street Roots’ sister paper in Seattle, Wash.