And yes, the people, the real victims and perhaps real heroes, are also still here.
We have just lived through another Mayday, with innumerable demonstrators in the streets, protesting primarily against the persecution of immigrants and refugees. Think of this contrast: while Trump proclaimed May 1st 2017 to be “Loyalty Day” (does he have no sense of irony whatsoever?), thousands upon thousands proclaimed their loyalty to a different America that they do not want to see die, a country where “no human being is illegal.”
What is paradoxical is that those workers and undocumented immigrants and women who are paid less than their male counterparts, marching though the avenues of Lincoln’s country, marching through its hopes and fears and memories, believe more in the promise of America than its President does, no matter that he was born in New York and expresses so lastingly what is deep and permanent in his land.
They are doing more, day and night, to keep this country running and alive than the man who is not, of course, a foreign agent, but, sadly for his fellow countrymen, continues to act more and more like one.
12.
MARTIN LUTHER KING MARCHES ON
Faraway, I was faraway from Washington D.C. that hot day in August of 1963 when Martin Luther King delivered his famous words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was faraway in Chile. Twenty-one years old at the time and entangled, like so many of my generation, in the struggle to liberate Latin America, the speech by King that was to influence my life so deeply did not even register with me, I cannot even recall having noticed its existence. What I can remember with ferocious precision, however, is the place and the date, and even the hour, when many years later I had occasion to listen for the first time to those “I have a dream” words, heard that melodious baritone, those incantations, that emotional certainty of victory. I can remember the occasion so clearly because it happened to be the day Martin Luther King was killed, April 4th, 1968, and ever since that day, his dream and his death have been grievously linked, conjoined in my mind then as they are now, fifty-four years later, in my memory.
I recall how I was sitting with my wife Angélica and our one-year-old child Rodrigo, in a living room, high up in the hills of Berkeley, the University town in California where we had arrived barely a week before. Our hosts, an American family that had generously offered us temporary lodgings while our apartment was being readied, had switched on the television and we all solemnly watched the nightly news, probably at seven in the evening, probably Walter Cronkite. And there it was, the murder of Martin Luther King in that Memphis hotel and then came reports of riots all over America and, finally, a long excerpt of his “I have a dream” speech.
It was only then, I think, that I realized, perhaps began to realize, who Martin Luther King had been, what we had lost with his departure from this world, the legend he was already becoming in front of my very eyes. In the years to come, I would often return to that speech and would, on each occasion, hew from its mountain of meanings a different rock upon which to stand and understand the world.
Beyond my amazement at King’s eloquence when I first heard him back in 1968, my immediate reaction was not so much to be inspired as to be somber, puzzled, close to despair. After all, the slaying of this man of peace was answered, not by a pledge to persevere in his legacy, but by furious uprisings in the slums of black America, the disenfranchised of America avenging their dead leader by burning down the ghettos where they felt imprisoned and impoverished, using the fire this time to proclaim that the non-violence King had advocated was useless, that the only way to end inequity in this world was through the barrel of a gun, the only way to make the powerful pay attention was to scare the hell out of them.
King’s assassination, therefore, savagely brought up yet one more time a question that had bedeviled me and so many other activists in the late sixties and is repeated now in our desolate 2017: what was the best method to achieve radical change? Could we picture a rebellion in the way that Martin Luther King had envisioned it, without drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred, without treating our adversaries as they treated us? Or does the road into the palace of justice and the bright day of brotherhood inevitably require violence as its companion, violence as the unavoidable midwife of revolution?
These were questions that, back in Chile, I would soon be forced to answer, not in cloudy theoretical musings, but in the day to day reality of hard history, when Salvador Allende was elected President in 1970 and we became the first country that tried to build socialism through peaceful means. Allende’s vision of social change, elaborated over decades of struggle and thought, was similar to King’s, even though they both came from very different political and cultural origins. Allende, for instance, who was not at all religious, would have not agreed with Martin Luther King that physical force must be met with soul force, but rather with the force of social organizing. At a time when many in Latin America were dazzled by the armed struggle proposed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, it was Allende’s singular accomplishment to imagine as inextricably connected the two quests of our era, the quest for more democracy and more civil freedoms, on the one hand, and the parallel quest, on the other, for social justice and economic empowerment of the dispossessed of this earth. And it was to be Allende’s fate to echo the fate of Martin Luther King, it was Allende’s choice to die three years later. Yes, on September 11th, 1973, almost ten years to the day since King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, Allende chose to die defending his own dream, promising us, in his last speech, that much sooner than later, más temprano que tarde, a day would come when the free men and women of Chile would walk through las amplias alamedas, the great avenues full of trees, towards a better society.
It was in the immediate aftermath of that terrible defeat, as we watched the powerful of Chile impose upon us the terror that we had not wanted to visit upon them, it was then, as our non-violence was met with executions and torture and disappearances, it was only then, after the military coup of 1973, that I first began to seriously commune with Martin Luther King, that his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial came back to haunt and to question me. It was as I headed into an exile that would last for many years that King’s voice and message began to filter fully, word by word, into my life.
If ever there was a situation where violence could be justified, after all, it would have been against the junta in Chile. Pinochet and his generals had overthrown a constitutional government and were killing and persecuting citizens whose radical sin had been to imagine a world where you do not need to massacre your opponents in order to allow the waters of justice to flow. And yet, very wisely, almost instinctively, the Chilean resistance embraced a different route: to slowly, resolutely, dangerously, take over the surface of the country, isolating the dictatorship inside and outside our nation, making Chile ungovernable through civil disobedience. Not entirely different from the strategy that the civil rights movement had espoused in the United States. And indeed, I never felt closer to Martin Luther King than during the seventeen years it took us to free Chile of its dictatorship. His words to the militants who thronged to Washington D.C. in 1963, demanding that they not lose faith, resonated with me, comforted my sad heart. He was speaking prophetically to me, to us, when he said: “I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells.” Dr. King was speaking to me and my comrades when he thundered: “Some of you come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering.” He understood that more difficult than going to your first protest, was to awaken the next day and go to the next protest and then the next one, the daily grind of small acts that can lead to large and lethal consequences. The dogs and sheriffs of Alabama and Mississippi were alive and well in the streets of Santiago and Valparaiso, and so was the spirit that had encouraged defens
eless men and women and children to be mowed down, beaten, bombed, harassed, and yet continue confronting their oppressors with the only weapons available to them: the suffering of their bodies and the conviction that nothing could make them turn back. And just like the blacks in the United States, so in Chile we also sang in the streets of the cities that had been stolen from us. Not spirituals, for every land has its own songs. In Chile we sang, over and over, the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in the hope that a day would come when all men would be brothers.
Why were we singing? To give ourselves courage, of course. But not only that, not only that. In Chile, we sang and stood against the hoses and the tear gas and the truncheons because we knew that somebody else was watching. In this, we also followed in the cunning, media-savvy, footsteps of Martin Luther King: that mismatched confrontation between the police state and the people was being witnessed, photographed, transmitted to other eyes. In the case of the deep South of the United States, the audience was the majority of the American people, while in that other struggle years later, in the deeper South of Chile, the daily spectacle of peaceful men and women being repressed by the agents of terror targeted the national and international forces whose support Pinochet and his dependent third world dictatorship needed in order to survive. The tactic worked, of course, because we understood, as Martin Luther King and Gandhi had before us, that our adversaries could be influenced and shamed by public opinion, could indeed eventually be compelled to relinquish power. That is how segregation was defeated in the South of the United States, that is how the Chilean people beat Pinochet in a plebiscite in 1988 that led to democracy in 1990 that is the story of the downfall of tyrannies in Iran and Poland, Tunisia and the Philippines. Although parallel struggles for liberation, against the apartheid regime in South Africa or the homicidal autocracy in Nicaragua or the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, also showed how King’s premonitory words of non-violence could not be mechanically applied to every situation.
And what of today? When I return to that speech I first heard all those years ago, the very day King died, is there a message for me, for us, something that we need to hear again, as if we were listening to those words for the first time as we confront a danger that would make our hero shudder?
What would Martin Luther King say if he contemplated what his country has become? If he could see how the terror and death brought to bear upon New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001, has turned his people into a fearful nation, ready to stop dreaming, ready to abridge its own freedoms to be secure? What would he say if he could observe how that fear has been manipulated to justify the invasion of a foreign land, the occupation of that land against the will of its own people? What alternative way would he have advised to be rid of a tyrant like Saddam Hussein? Would he tell those who oppose these policies inside the United States to stand up and be counted, to march ahead, to never wallow in the valley of despair? And Trump! Trump who soils his mouth by quoting Martin Luther King, Trump, who believes that Frederick Douglass is still alive, who insults the heroic John Lewis as someone who is all talk and no action, mocks John Lewis who was beaten by the police on freedom marches and risked his life, Trump, what would Martin Luther King say to an America that has elected Trump to occupy the office that saw the Civil Rights Bill signed?
It is my belief that he would repeat some of the words he delivered on that faraway day in August of 1963 in the shadow of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, I believe he would declare again his faith in his country and how deeply his dream is rooted in the American dream, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, his dream was still alive and that his nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
Let us hope that he is right. Let us hope and pray, for his sake and our sake, that Martin Luther King’s faith in his own country was not misplaced and that more than five decades later enough of his compatriots and mine will once again learn to listen to his fierce and gentle voice calling to them from beyond death and beyond fear, calling on all of us to stand together for freedom and justice in our time.
13.
SEARCHING FOR MANDELA2
It may seem paradoxical that a meditation dealing with memory and meant to celebrate the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela should start with the confession that I cannot evoke the date when I first heard his name. When he was imprisoned in 1962, I was twenty years old and an itty bit of a firebrand myself, really of the minor variety, taking time off from my studies at the University of Chile in Santiago to fight the police in the streets and help organize slum dwellers in the shanty-towns of my impoverished nation. South Africa was in our same Southern Hemisphere, and already the symbol of the most unjust and inhumane system in the world, but its struggle was a mere glimmer, resplendent yet distant, on the consciousness of a generation whose heroes were Che Guevara and, closer by, Salvador Allende, who was to become the first socialist elected by democratic means to the Presidency of Chile in 1970. Even during the three years of Allende’s peaceful revolution whose ideals could have been modeled on the Freedom Charter of the ANC, even during those thousand days when we did our best to create a country where no child was hungry and no peasant was landless and no foreign corporations owned our soil and our souls, even then, I can’t recall that we specifically protested Mandela’s captivity, except as part of a general repudiation of apartheid.
It was only after Salvador Allende died in a military coup in 1973, only after I went into exile, when I started to wander this earth like a makwerkwere, that the name of Mandela gradually became a primary beacon of hope, a sort of home to me, now that I was homeless. By the seventies, of course, he had already solidified into a symbol of how our spirit cannot be broken by brutality, but his significance to me also grew out of the collusion of the twin twisted governments that misruled our respective people. The apartheid government that imprisoned him and his fellow patriots and denied them and millions of South Africans their basic rights, turned out to be one of the scant allies of the South American dictatorship that banished me and was ravaging my land. Vorster and Botha were the pals of our Generalissimo, Augusto Pinochet—they exchanged medals and ambassadors and pariah state visits, they sent each other admiring gifts, they shared weapons and intelligence and even tear gas canisters. I could continue with many unfortunate and shameful examples, but one intersection of South African terror and Chilean terror should suffice: in 1976, the year of the Soweto massacre, we were suffering a slow massacre of our own. The Chilean junta and Pinochet were making infamous around the world the system of disappearing people, arresting them and then denying their bodies to desperate relatives. Both dictatorships sought to create through violence a world where no rebel would dare to step into visibility, would dare to rise up. So my increasing reverence for Mandela in the seventies and eighties cannot be separated from the fact that his people and my people, the people of South Africa and the people of Chile, were bent on a parallel quest for justice against a brotherhood of enemies who wanted to disappear us from the face of the earth, as if our very memory had never existed. Even so, it was not until Chile regained its democracy in 1990 and Mandela’s release that very same year, it was not until both his country and mine and indeed the world began to wrestle with the dilemmas of how you confront the terrors of the past without becoming a hostage to the hatred engendered by that past, it was not until both South Africa and Chile were forced to ask themselves the same burning questions about remembrance and dialogue in our similar transitions to democracy, it was only then that Madiba became more than a legend to me and, with his wisdom and pragmatic compassion, grew into a guide for contemporary humanity. Because those of us who had struggled against injustice were to learn that it is often more difficult to listen to your enemies and forgive them than it was to suffer their atrocities, to learn that it may be more morally complicated to navigate the temptations and nuance
s of freedom than to keep your head high and your heart beating strong in the midst of an oppression that clearly and unambiguously marks the line between right and wrong.
It is these difficulties and these moral intricacies that I would like to explore on this occasion. And I would like to do so from the perspective of a storyteller, someone who, through the decades of battling the dictatorship in Chile, came to believe that he had been spared death many times over so he could keep alive the memory of what the powerful wanted to suppress. Let me start, then, with a story, one that complements and also complicates the story of redemption that Nelson Mandela continues to embody. That is what writers do: plunge into the vast complexity of our human condition rather than be content with simple answers that leave us satisfied and comfortable.
A few years back, while giving away books to schoolchildren in a Chilean shanty-town, as part of a literacy program that an NGO had been organizing, I was approached by an old carpenter. “If it’s true that you worked by the side of Salvador Allende,” he said, “I have a story to tell you.” Carlos—that was his name, if I’m not mistaken—had been an enthusiastic supporter of Salvador Allende’s government. Allende had created a program that helped Carlos to purchase his first and only house, Allende had understood why children—including the children of Carlos—should have free milk and lunch at school, Allende had filled that carpenter with hope that workers need not be forever dispossessed of a future, and that this could be done respecting the freedom of all. Following the military takeover of September 11, 1973 that left Allende buried in an unmarked grave and his image forbidden, soldiers raided the carpenter’s neighborhood, breaking down doors, beating, arresting, and shooting residents. Terror-stricken, Carlos had hidden away behind the boards of one of the walls of his house a picture of the martyred President, where it remained all through the seventeen years of the dictatorship. He did not extract it, Carlos informed me, even when democracy returned to Chile and Pinochet had to relinquish his stranglehold over the government. Pinochet might not be the country’s strongman anymore but he still malingered on as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and his disciples still controlled large enclaves in the judiciary and the media, and, above all, among those who had prospered obscenely during Pinochet’s neoliberal regime. Though perhaps more crucially, Pinochet’s shadow inhabited the nightmares of many Chileans: they still feared his malevolent aftermath, that he would one day come back and seek revenge. Free elections were not enough to release that carpenter from his dread. The state funeral that Allende received was not enough. And not enough either when a Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped the country come to terms with its past, like its counterpart in South Africa a few years later. It was only in 1998 when General Pinochet, during a visit to London, was arrested for crimes against humanity that Carlos pried back the boards that concealed the portrait of Salvador Allende, and there it was, after 25 years, intact, his Presidente lindo, his beautiful President, he said, just as he recalled the man. Taking that portrait from its hiding place changed Carlos. When Pinochet was flown back to Chile after eighteen months of London house arrest, Carlos was scared, but this time he gathered his courage and kept the picture of Allende hanging defiantly on the wall. Never again, he said, was he going to hide it.
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