The justification for these acts was always the same: Chile was at war. The country was about to be taken over by communists, and the military had acted just in time to save the nation from a brutal Marxist regime loyal to Cuba and Moscow. It was the ghost of Che Guevara the military was fighting, not just implicitly but explicitly: before the coup the rightist newspaper El Mercurio (which was extensively funded by the CIA) portrayed the preposterous Comandante Pepe as an all-powerful KGB agent. Rumor, propaganda, and paranoia amplified Pepe’s fifty hapless, pick-and-shovel followers into a crack squad of five thousand Cuban-trained guerrillas led by North Korean and North Vietnamese advisers. When the coup came, a few local communists did grab guns and head for the hills, hoping to escape to Argentina. But there was no doubt who had lost this Battle of Valdivia: one policeman and two soldiers died in shootouts, but in the end the regime took the lives of one hundred and twenty-eight local civilians. In a few months the leftist movements of Valdivia were extinguished, their dream of standing in the vanguard of history now washed away like detritus on one of the region’s fast-moving rivers.
Once the immediate control of the countryside had been established, each of the armed forces contributed some four hundred or five hundred men to the joint operations of DINA, the military intelligence unit whose acronym became a synonym for murder in Latin America. Special military squads called “death caravans” were unleashed, rolling through the countryside to round up and “disappear” opponents of the new regime (one caravan in northern Chile eliminated seventy-six subversivos in two months). DINA targeted Chileans according to a strict list of priorities. During 1974 the main targets were the leadership of MIR (the Left Revolutionary Movement), the one small armed guerrilla group that tried, under the leadership of Salvador Allende’s son, to resist the military coup. With MIR wiped out within the first year, the killing shifted to members of the Socialist Party, once an important legitimate member of the government coalition. By 1976 it was the small and bureaucratic Communist Party that DINA was wiping out. DINA and its successor agencies also attacked Chileans in exile: a general who had the courage to resist the coup and go abroad (killed in Buenos Aires in 1974); a moderate Christian Democratic leader and his wife (shot in Italy in 1975); and a former aide to Allende (blown up in Washington, D.C., in 1976).
Roberto and I bonded over this last case. Orlando Letelier was a charismatic aide to President Allende when the tanks rolled in 1973. He’d been imprisoned in a notorious concentration camp near the Antarctic Circle and finally sent into exile. In September 1976, he was heading to work at a Washington, D.C., think tank when a bomb planted in his car vaporized his legs and killed him immediately. His passenger, an American named Roni Moffit, wasn’t as lucky. She took a sliver of metal through the neck and slowly choked to death on her own blood while passersby struggled to help. I explained to Roberto that I took this one personally: I’d grown up around Washington and had driven through that traffic circle a million times. I remembered the day the bomb went off, and the long, ponderous investigation that followed every clue but the obvious ones. Right-wing columnists, retired CIA officers, and American diplomats had spent years trying to blame the bombing on the left. Letelier had been blown up by his own supporters, they argued, as part of a clever, Moscow-Havana plot to smear General Pinochet. Unfortunately for this theory, the evidence was clear, down to the paper trail of receipts and airline tickets eventually uncovered by the FBI: the bomb had been planted by DINA agents dispatched from Santiago.
And this was where Roberto joined in my personal interest. The officer in charge of the operation was none other than General (then Colonel) Manuel Contreras, the subject of Roberto’s mocking essay in Caballo de Proa. The civilian government finally got around to prosecuting Contreras in the 1990s; he had been convicted, had appealed, had lost his appeal, and was now, as we talked, cowering in his military hospital issuing demands. Like a good soldier, he was careful to cover his rear; Contreras filed an affidavit stating that “only [Pinochet] as supreme authority of DINA had the power to order the missions that were executed. Always in my capacity as delegate for the President, I carried out strictly what was ordered.” This was an obvious threat. If Pinochet sacrificed Contreras to the civilians, Contreras would reveal who ordered the Letelier attack and DINA’s many other murders. As a moral defense, this “just following orders” explanation would never clear Contreras, but as a political maneuver it was smart.
While Roberto showed me paperwork on all of these events, he emphasized the names, not the numbers. There was an individuality to the names that evaporated in the meaningless debate over statistics. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had identified 2,279 people who died violently at the hands of the regime. The commission had been unable to resolve another 642 deaths for lack of evidence, leading to a round, consensus figure that 3,000 people had “disappeared.” Like everyone I’d talked to who had been involved in the actual enumeration of the dead, however, Roberto found the official estimates absurdly low. He was convinced that about 6,000 had died across Chile. There were at least four more graves in the immediate Valdivia area that had never been opened, he said. I asked him why he didn’t go out with some of the human rights people and dig them up. “I had to quit working in the graves,” he replied. “Death has numbed me.”
“Those involved are still prominent throughout government, business, every kind of commerce, the police, the landowners, and common citizens,” Roberto added. “They don’t want their past dug up.” He spoke while staring out a little window of this top-floor room, watching the street below. This was Chile’s sentence in history: the victims and the victimizers had to walk past each other on the street every day. Guilt could not be acknowledged because guilt calls for retribution, for punishment and perhaps even justice.
There was a little item Roberto had written and taped to the wall:
Don’t remain in the past! Forget that your father, your mother, your brother was murdered. Forget that you were tortured. Forget that you cannot find your family member who disappeared. Forget that the murderers were dressed in green and gray. Look to the future, man!
Forget about the past. Think about foreign investment, the free market, globalization. Think about the future. Think about new times. In fact, that was the slogan of the national government: “We’re living in new times.”
Before I left Roberto gave me a book of poetry by Clemente Riedemann, the fellow who had been on-stage at the municipal theater reminiscing about Fidel Castro in the shower. Roberto had done the illustrations for Riedemann’s collection of poems, called Karra Maw’n, which was the Mapuche Indian name for this land before the conquistadors like Pedro de Valdivia arrived. It means “land of rain.”
“Ironic,” Roberto said. “You’ve brought sunshine to the land of rain.” It was true: the sun had come out and from his little window he could see over a sunlit downtown Valdivia.
“For Patricio,” he wrote on the title page, “on the trail of Ernesto, past and present.”
Kooky was running intermittently, and I pursued the rumor of a new battery up into the hills, climbing a long, well-maintained gravel road into a settlement that I’d call a slum except for the fact that the houses had running water and electricity. Give the devil his due: Pinochet had pushed basic sanitation services into the poorest neighborhoods, and people in Peru and Bolivia would have looked at these slums with envy.
I found the mechanic I’d been told about, a young fellow who ran a shop out of his garage. Unfortunately, he was out of batteries. He wrote down the address of a motorcycle shop in Osorno, but when I tried to leave Kooky just sat there. The mechanic—who’d never set eyes on me before—handed me the keys to his own 125 cc dirt bike, which I rode to Osorno. I strapped the new battery on the back and returned up the gravel road two hours later.
There were a couple of Chilean policemen waiting there when I returned. They were making cosmetic repairs to the dirt bikes they rode on patrol in the settlement
, green Japanese bikes with the crossed rifles of the carabineros painted on the tanks. They asked me a million questions about my trip and helped me install the battery. They said the only problem in this poor settlement was a small influx of drugs. They like working in the area and said the people were first rate.
They were just like the lawmen who filled Che’s diary: polite, generous, correct in all their behavior. This might have seemed obvious in 1952, but in retrospect—given what the carabineros had done in Chile—it was disconcerting.
I went around the Paula two days in a row, but I never saw Pedro or Ricardo again.
The poet Pablo Neruda grew up in Temuco, which is about all I knew of the place when I pulled into town just before noon after an easy ride up from Valdivia. I circled the large town plaza and parked Kooky on the sidewalk in front of the local newspaper, El Diario Austral. A gray-haired rental cop trundled out to shoo me away but his heart wasn’t in it. When I said I was actually going into the newspaper on business he agreed to look after the machine and me. I left the luggage tied on, smoothed my clothes, and went inside. The elevator was sparkling, and I looked at myself in the reflective doors—greasy, dusty, and dubious. Six weeks of Patagonian austerity had shaken off the bloat of B.A. I was lean, sunburned, and needed a shave. The doors opened on the newsroom.
It was like newsrooms everywhere. Desks were scattered about in clumps and there was paper on every surface. Phones jangled incessantly. It looked like twenty or so people worked in the room, but only a few were present and none of them looked up when I came in.
A secretary told me to wait, and I set my helmet on the bench beside me. The archivist came out and listened to my request. He led me to the back of the room, to a reading table tall enough to stand at. In a moment he produced a heavy, bound volume of back issues from 1952. He was not interested in me and went away. Buried in the back pages, near a political gossip column and the news of an insecticide campaign, was a photograph of two Argentine motorcyclists who had just arrived in Temuco. With their disheveled hair and soiled jumpsuits even the short Granado looked rather dashing while Guevara resembled a movie star. Translated literally, which is how I was reading it, the article went like this:
TWO ARGENTINE LEPROLOGY EXPERTS
TOUR SOUTH AMERICA BY MOTORBIKE
They are in Temuco and want to visit Easter Island
Since yesterday has been found in Temuco the doctor of biochemistry, Mr. Alberto Granados and the student of the seventh year of medical studies in the University of Buenos Aires, Mr. Ernesto Guevara Serna, who are completing a raid by motorcycle with the purpose of visiting the principal countries of Latin America.
The raiders left the province of Córdoba the 29th of December. They are effecting the trip on an English machine brand “Norton.”
Specialists in Leprology
The visiting scientists are specialists in leprology and other types of infirmities derived from this terrible illness. They know amply the problem that in this aspect affected their country: they have some three thousand patients that are interned at the leprosariums of Cerritos, Diamantes, General Rodríguez, Córdoba, and Posadas. Also they have visited the centers of curing that exist in Brazil, one of the countries that has a high percentage of the ill.
Interested in Knowing the Easter Island
Apart from the particular interest in coming to know the reality of the health system in the diverse countries of South America, Misters Granados and Guevara, who are effecting the trip with their own economic means, have special interest to know up close the Chilean leper colony at Easter Island … the scientist raiders wish to end their trip in Venezuela. Ending their visit of one day to Temuco, Misters Granados and Guevara continue today in the morning heading for Concepción.
Not quite. At the very moment they were supposed to be rattling toward Concepción the “scientist raiders” were actually ensconced safely at the breakfast table, engaged in Ernesto’s favorite pastime: eating.
The previous day had gone badly for the boys. Shortly after leaving the newspaper and Temuco, La Poderosa got a flat tire; then it began to rain. Wet and miserable, they were rescued by a veterinary student named Raúl, who put La Poderosa on his truck and drove them back to town. The bike was left in a garage on the outskirts.
Raúl was their type of guy. He had a semblance of education (Raúl was “not a very serious” veterinary student, Guevara noted admiringly) and a fondness for food, drink, and chasing girls. Ernesto knew just how to play his new friend. Raúl was soon boasting about how much money he spent at the local “cabaret”; shortly thereafter he invited the Argentines to join him there, at his own expense. The cabaret, of course, was a whorehouse. Ernesto called it “that very interesting place of entertainment.”
In the end, Raúl withdrew his financial backing, a move that only seemed to increase Ernesto’s respect for him. Too broke to pay for their own sex, the boys accepted the lesser satisfaction of food. At one in the morning Raúl took them home, fed them everything they could eat, and put them both in one bed. It wasn’t who they had wanted to sleep with, but they were old friends by now.
In the morning, Che put on his boots—the only things he had removed for sleep—and went to find the newspaper. He must have felt a growing tension as he flipped through the paper (he noted how many more pages there were than he expected) and then relief when he finally spotted the article about two Argentine raiders.
Just as he had hoped, the publicity changed everything. The family suddenly discovered that the motorcycle bums in their midst were actually famous medical authorities. The visitors were “no longer just a pair of reasonably likable bums with a bike in tow. No, we were now ‘the experts,’ and that’s how we were treated.” Everywhere they walked in town they were recognized and lauded, thanks to the article. They spent the rest of the day working on the bike while “a little dark maid” brought them snacks.
The publicity scam they had first attempted in Valdivia had now been perfected. Aside from having its desired effect—acting as a letter of introduction to the region’s public—the article suffered from a few inaccuracies. Alberto Granado had gained an s while sitting in someone’s notebook, but such mistakes are virtually required in journalism. The real changes in the story were the work of Che, as he boasted that morning in his diary. Here is my favorite entry of his whole journal:
This was our audacity in a nutshell. We, the experts, key figures in the field of leprology in the Americas, with vast experience, having treated three thousand patients, familiar with all the important centers on the continent and their sanitary conditions, had deigned to visit this picturesque, melancholy little town.… Soon the whole family had gathered round the article and all the other items in the paper were treated with Olympian contempt. And so, basking in their admiration, we said goodbye to these people of whom we remember nothing, not even their name.
Emphasis mine. It was impossible not to laugh the first time I read this. Ernesto had inflated his résumé to a gullible local journalist, leavening the minor sin with acute self-mockery. In exchange he got what he needed: a complimentary article that, displayed like a set of credentials, led directly to a free meal or three.
I had to wonder what had happened to that self-mocking tone. The young man had been skeptical of his own urges in a way the older self would forget.
I stood around the Diario Austral newsroom for a while, left, came back in, left again, went down in the elevator, went up again, went down and across the street to eat lunch, and, fortified by a beer, went back into the newsroom. I asked to speak to the editor. A heavy man in a tie and sweater vest trundled into the room.
“I’m a famous American writer,” I said, and when he didn’t blink I added that I was a special correspondent to The New York Times, a columnist at The Washington Post, a contributor for various magazines, and editorial director of the Express, which sounded like a good name for either a paper or a magazine.
I told him about the purpose of my
trip, showed him Che’s diary, and took him to the reading table, which was still open to the clip from 1952. “I want you to write an article about me,” I said. He stared at me blankly and said nothing that I can remember, but gestured for me to wait in the conference room. A moment later a beautiful dark-haired reporter named Pilar and a photographer joined me. I answered all their questions, exaggerating wildly, and was careful to put the helmet where it would show in photographs. (If you want to Be Like Che, you really have to Be Like Che.)
I went downstairs, unsure what I had wrought, and prepared to ride away on Kooky.
“Good luck,” the rent-a-cop at the entrance said.
I spent the night on a patch of dust beside the Bío Bío river. I’d pulled in just as it was getting dark. As a camping spot, the riverbank offered few amenities—a grove of fragrant conifers, water for cooking rice, and the softness of the powdery ground—but it had the advantage of being neither legal nor illegal. Late at night a Chilean family in an old station wagon pulled into the grove, spread out a few blankets, and went to sleep, too.
In the morning I brushed dust and a few loose feathers from the sleeping bag and looked at the river. It was broad and slow moving, shallow but with a few deep pools and undercut banks that might hold trout. I pulled the rod case from where it had been resting on the back of the bike and began jointing the four pieces together. Just then a group of four female Mapuche Indians—two women and two girls, in peasant dresses, with long braided hair—came wading down the river. They set up shop on a gravel bar in front of me and began scrubbing their laundry on rocks. They were the poorest people I had seen in Chile, and the darkest. I disassembled the rod, slipped the pieces back into their cloth sleeve, and tied the case back onto the side of my backpack. I knew it was the last time I would handle the rod. The road ran north now for thousands of miles, and the farther I went the worse things would be.
Chasing Che Page 14