Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  Until, that is, Glenn Kaiser, the lead singer of the church’s heavy metal band and one of its main pastors, came by our College Street apartment while in Toronto on church business. We had a pleasantly friendly visit, but as he prepared to go on his way, Glenn said something about being glad to meet my wife. Judy was quick to correct him. “Oh, we’re not married,” she said. A look of surprise appeared on his face, immediately followed by a darkening expression. He bade us a polite but somewhat curt farewell. I never saw him again.

  Members of JPUSA were noticeable by their absence from my subsequent shows in Chicago. A couple of years later a disaffected former member wrote to me, saying that while he’d been a resident at their communal hostel, word had come down that I was persona non grata, and that all members should divest themselves of my albums as soon as possible. I was sorry things had gone that way, and it rankled to be so judged by someone who was no better than I.

  A year or so later Judy and I bought a house together, around the time that Peggy and Harry experienced an “adventure” more typical of urban centres farther south. They were sound asleep in their third-floor walk-up at 5 A.M. one summer Saturday when a loud crash woke them. Peggy stumbled groggily into the kitchen to discover that the sink was full of glass. The window above it had been shot out, and there was a corresponding hole in the opposite wall. Had it been a weekday, Harry might well have found the hole in himself, as he would have been standing in front of the window making his morning tea. Police investigated—canvassing, among others, the Jamaicans downstairs, who were still partying from the night before—but turned up nothing.

  With Peggy Cade of “Peggy’s Kitchen Wall” during a demonstration at Queens Park

  in Toronto, late eighties

  The bullet had to have come from the neighbouring apartment, whose kitchen window faced Peggy’s, but when the cops stormed in and searched the place, they found no trace of a gun. Peggy and Harry got a good tale to tell, and I got a song out of it. The episode would have made a better story had it remained a mystery. As life would have it, the resolution was sadder and messier. Several years later, the woman next door decided that her husband had beaten her up one time too many. She went to the authorities and told them where they might find the pistol. The shooting had apparently been an accidental discharge: her guy was threatening her with his loaded .38 and oops, it went off. He went to jail. Hopefully she got on with her life.

  Crashing in the kitchen, noises in the hall

  Roll over and go back to sleep—it’s just a dream, that’s all

  So how come the window’s broken?

  What caused the glass to fall?

  And who put that bullet hole in Peggy’s kitchen wall?

  Police arrive—muddy up the floor

  Dig out half the plaster—it’s a .38 for sure

  Kick the neighbour’s door in

  Saying, “Better tell it all.”

  Who put that bullet hole in Peggy’s kitchen wall?

  Blaster on the back porch shaking up the lane

  They’re drinking gin and joking, laughter falling down like rain

  Everybody wears a halo

  Never saw nothin’ at all

  So who put that bullet hole in Peggy’s kitchen wall?

  Tell me who put that bullet hole in Peggy’s kitchen wall?

  “PEGGY’S KITCHEN WALL,” 1983

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/51.

  Judy did her best to crank me open emotionally and to be an every-second-weekend mother to Jenny, whom she loved. Our relationship had its fire, and real love, but it also suffered from my being gone half the time and not totally present when I was around. The house we shared, as with all the places I’ve lived, never felt like more than base camp. Home was the road. I carried my alienation wherever I went, but it was of less immediate consequence while in motion among people who didn’t know me so well. This might be why, in early 1987, just after the recording of Big Circumstance, Judy decided to end the relationship. She was searching for something. I was not it. We remain close friends, though.

  I was a reasonably competent part-time father to Jenny, but I didn’t relate to children very well. Kids no longer frightened me, but I never felt like I had been one, so I didn’t have much of a sense of how it felt to be her. Jenny was lucky to have Kitty as an engaged and demonstrably loving mother. She was cautious with Judy because she didn’t understand how this new partner of mine fit into things.

  Me and Judy, Prince Edward County, mid-eighties

  Jenny was a smart and self-possessed kid. The seas would get rough for her in the years ahead, but she would come through with courage and clarity. Later, after she had a child of her own and then split up with the father, she understood what Judy had been compelled to deal with.

  Meanwhile, 1983 continued to be a year filled with travel. After the trip to Central America I toured Australia and New Zealand for the first time, returned to Toronto, and then, in December, flew back to the Southern Hemisphere and the troubled land of Chile.

  At that time, Chile was under siege. Ten years earlier the country had succumbed to the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a U.S.-backed military coup. A concentration of displaced Chileans now lived in Toronto, mostly interwoven with the expatriate Greek community around Danforth Avenue. They included artists, union leaders, government officials, teachers, and other survivors of Pinochet’s Gleichschaltung. The Danforth had become the scene of an exciting, fertile cultural cross-pollination between Latin American and Greek dissidents who had suffered under their own military dictatorship. (Toronto was, in fact, the seat of Greece’s government in exile.)

  There was a lot of sympathy among Canadians for the Chileans. One supporter, a woman named Terri Jackman, contacted Bernie to see if I might join a delegation to their first (and, it would turn out, only) Congress of Artists and Cultural Workers of Chile. I was quick to sign on.

  It was a courageous undertaking on their part. They were the survivors of a campaign of repression carried on by the regime against all who opposed them or even seemed to be the type who might oppose them. In addition to facing interrogation, consignment to concentration camps, internal exile to the country’s harsh northern desert or frozen far south, and assassination, artists disapproved of by the regime were locked out of media outlets, including radio, television, recording studios, concert halls, galleries, and museums. Nobody could make a living, and the country’s cultural communities had shriveled. Pinochet had banned performances, publication, broadcast, and installation of all but the most politically inoffensive arts. Our job, coming from the outside, was to attend the congress as witnesses and “human shields.” The assumption was that even the general’s security hounds would be held in check if there were sufficient international scrutiny.

  We were all aware of the 1973 coup in which Pinochet, with assistance from American military and intelligence operatives and their associated business allies, violently overthrew a democratically elected leader to save Chile from the cancer of equitable distribution of wealth. It was a terrible and, one might say, familiar story in the region. But historically, Chile had been the most stable democracy in Latin America, so the Chileans had nothing to compare it with.

  Pinochet led an assault by all branches of the national military against the presidency of Salvador Allende, who in 1970 had become the first democratically elected socialist in the Western Hemisphere. Emboldened despite winning by a margin of only thirty-nine thousand votes over the far-right National Party, Allende’s administration began nationalizing industries and redistributing land to meet the growing needs of Chile’s poor, a class rapidly expanding under stifling inflation and foreign ownership of land and industry. It was a brave but ultimately disastrous course.

  Total foreign investment at the time was $788 million, a significant sum in 1970, of which 75 percent was American. Allende’s government nationalized the major copper holdings of Anaconda and Kennecott, as we
ll as First National City Bank, the General Motors factory, and the Ford Motor Company.

  The government also had the temerity to nationalize the holdings of ITT, the U.S.-based international communications conglomerate. John McCone, an ITT bigwig, had been director of the CIA from 1961 to 1965. Thousands of pages of documents released since the coup, including a 2000 internal report by the CIA itself, have revealed how McCone and other business leaders conspired with the administration of U.S. president Richard M. Nixon—particularly national security advisor (and later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger and CIA head Richard Helms—to direct Allende’s removal from office.

  While there is no evidence that the Canadian government assisted with the coup, Canadian industry, especially the mining sector, was happy to benefit from the reversal of Allende’s socialist policies. According to a 2005 report by Mining Watch Canada and the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts, “Canadian mining companies have led the increase of mining investment in Chile since the ’90s.” The Chilean business elite has many friends in Canada, including Toronto businessman Peter Munk, the eighty-six-year-old chairman of Barrick Gold Corporation, the world’s largest gold mining company. According to the Canadian activist group Protest-Barrick, at the company’s 1996 shareholder meeting Munk praised Pinochet for “transforming Chile from a wealth-destroying socialist state to a capital-friendly model that is being copied around the world.” Munk said with sickening cynicism, conscious or otherwise, that Pinochet “can put people in jail, I have no comment on that, I think that may be true,” but that the incarcerations were worth it “because it brought wealth to an enormous number of people. If you ask somebody who is in jail, he’ll say no. But that’s the wonderful thing about our world; we can have the freedom to disagree.”

  In 1996 Chile signed its first-ever Free Trade Agreement, and it was with Canada. (It was the era of such things. That same year we also signed a similar deal with Israel.) Today Canada is Chile’s largest outside investor, pumping over $13 billion into the country in 2010.

  Prior to Allende’s election, Henry Kissinger had famously said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” (And they call it democracy.) After Allende took office, it was Kissinger who devised what he called a “two-track” program designed to unseat him—a successful enterprise, as we have seen.

  The aftermath of the coup included the assassination of high-ranking Allende supporters. Most infamously, on September 21, 1976, operatives from Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA, led by American Michael Townley, bombed the car of Chilean economist Orlando Letelier, who had served under Allende as ambassador and minister of defense. The killing was shocking enough, but the location—in Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., directly in front of the Chilean embassy—brought Pinochet’s war on human rights to the doorstep of his most powerful ally. Letelier was working at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive Washington think tank, and was driving to the office with his colleague Ronnie Moffitt and her newlywed husband, Michael. Ronnie died. Michael survived. (In 2000 I had the honour of singing at IPS’s annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards ceremony, which commemorates the two by recognizing heroes of the human rights movement.)

  The Letelier killing was one of many implemented under Operation Condor, an organized effort by several U.S.-backed South American regimes to assassinate their populist opponents. Henry Kissinger was, at the very least, well aware of the program but took no diplomatic measures to stop it. At least sixty thousand people died as a result of Operation Condor.

  Inside Chile during the first days after the coup, the situation was desperate. Pinochet’s military had thrown so many people in jail that they had to use a Santiago boxing stadium as a makeshift prison. Thousands were incarcerated there: artists, leftists, military personnel believed to be “disloyal” to the new regime, students and professors and grade-school teachers, janitors and traffic cops, shantytown dwellers—the gamut of Chilean society, excepting in large part the upper tiers of the Chilean business class, many of whom supported Pinochet.

  Among the victims was Alberto Bachelet, an Air Force official arrested and then tortured every day for months before he died on March 12, 1974. Soon thereafter Chilean security forces arrested Bachelet’s wife, Ángela Jeria Gómez, and their daughter, Michelle Bachelet. Both were repeatedly tortured and eventually released to exile in Australia. Incredibly, Michelle Bachelet returned to Chile in 1979, became a physician, and, in 2006, displaying the courage and resilience that was the lasting hallmark of the Allende period, was elected Chile’s first female president.

  Another victim was the beloved Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara. On September 12, 1973—less than twenty-four hours after the coup—the military seized Jara and threw him, with the multitude of others, into Chile Stadium. Jara was a close ally of Allende’s and had played at many of his campaign rallies, including some at that same arena. In the stadium a soldier recognized Jara, kicked him to the ground, and dragged him to a basement. There his captors broke his fingers and wrists so he couldn’t play guitar to cheer his fellow prisoners, then tortured him for five days before murdering him with machine-gun fire. His body was dumped with five others on a street in Santiago. An autopsy revealed that Jara was shot forty-four times.

  The coup destroyed more than a century of independence and democratic rule in Chile, on a continent where such things were fleeting at best, and installed a seventeen-year dictatorship that became a worldwide symbol of flagrant and widespread human rights abuse. Pinochet was finally ousted in an election in 1991, but he continued to control the Chilean military until 1998, when he was indicted in Spain in connection with the deaths of Spanish nationals at the hands of his forces. Chilean government investigators later reported that in the first months after the coup, the DINA rounded up more than seven thousand suspected political opponents. Virtually all of them were tortured, and more than two thousand were killed. (In 1999 The Progressive magazine reported that the Pinochet regime eventually “detained 40,000 people, tortured large numbers of them, exiled 9,000, and murdered 4,000.”)

  All of this was done with the full knowledge and support of many U.S. intelligence and military officials and operatives, including top officials at the CIA and the Pentagon, as well as members of Congress and certainly members of the Nixon administration, especially Henry Kissinger but also Nixon himself. A 2000 CIA report states that the “CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende. . . . Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses. . . . Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or U.S. military.”

  Aside: Mr. Kissinger and I share a birthday. While I was writing this book, in 2013, Kissinger enjoyed a ninetieth-birthday bash at what the Daily Beast characterized as “New York’s most glamorous dining room in Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel.” The event “drew an astonishing lineup of luminaries, including former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, former French president Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, former chief of staff James Baker, former secretary of state Colin Powell, Gen. David Petraeus, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. . . . Former president Bill Clinton, former secretary of state George Shultz, and current secretary of state John Kerry all came to the podium to toast what Kerry called America’s ‘indispensable statesman.’” That a man who was apparently indispensable to the design of policies that killed millions of unarmed, innocent peasants in Southeast Asia, and destroyed the lives of countless others around the world, was feted so lavishly instead of being consigned to a bare cell is evidence of the power of the “principalities and powers” that run the world.

  We arrived in Santiago three months after Pinochet held national celebrations marking the tenth anniversary of his accession to power. Public enthusiasm for
the event was dampened by a devastating collapse of the economy the previous year, which, though we did not know it then, signaled the beginning of the end of Pinochet’s regime. He would not go down easily, or quickly, but down he would go, mostly under the pressure of an ever-swelling number of newly impoverished citizens who had previously known little of the privation an authoritarian regime could create. Santiago is a beautiful and sophisticated capital city, yet shantytowns encircled the metropolis like a funeral wreath, and they were swelling with the ranks of what was once, by South American standards, a relatively strong middle class. Chile was crashing, and it was clear who was in the driver’s seat.

  Though the term would not be coined for many years yet, here was Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism,” as the Pinochet junta and its elite supporters, after creating a sense of disaster around the election of a socialist president, and the “need” to respond by ousting him, proceeded to loot the nation’s treasury and resources at the expense of the rest of the citizenry. It’s an old yet very current story.

  In addition to Terri Jackman and me, our delegation included Arlene Mantle, a singer-songwriter who worked closely with labour unions; Dr. Meyer Brownstone, chairman of the board of Oxfam Canada and director of the University of Toronto’s Center for Urban and Community Studies; and Terri’s brother Joe, whose job was to document the goings-on photographically. There were two other small delegations, from Norway and Switzerland, and that was it—a much smaller international presence than organizers had hoped for.

  We flew in as tourists, acting as if we didn’t know each other: “Beautiful country you’ve got here.” As we disembarked onto the tarmac, we were greeted by an intelligence agent who was photographing every face that came off the plane. Inside the terminal, we proceeded down a long, narrow corridor with unmarked doorways on either side. Meyer and I found ourselves walking alone, which is when he said, “If they were going to disappear us, it would happen here. They’d drag us through one of those doors and we’d be gone.” I felt as if I had stepped into Nazi Germany, with heavily armed military everywhere and control of all aspects of life by a band of ideological thugs whose main domestic-policy directive was violence. They even staged public book burnings.