Chasing Che (18 page)

This was the “very nice” article the
Correo de Valdivia
had published on Monday, February 18, 1952. On a Monday morning forty-four years later the archivist at the municipal building, a mousy man with thick glasses and a sweater vest, had quickly located the volume, and after much turning to and fro I’d found the clip. The paper had stylized their trip as a “raid,” a glamorous term for long-distance racing that ill fit the supposed medical agenda of the two Argentines but that pleased Guevara (upon his return home he insisted on describing the trip as a “raid” to unimpressed friends).

When I showed the article to the archivist—pointing to the name Ernesto Guevara—he looked slightly ill and backpedaled toward his desk, where he buried his nose again in another book. The novelist Isabel Allende—a niece of the deposed president—noted acerbically that any discussion of the past here was “in really bad taste.”

I sought out one of the small number of people in Valdivia with that kind of bad taste. Roberto Arroyo was the painter who had written the little satire about jail that I’d liked so much in
Caballo de Proa
. Despite claiming in the piece that he could not abide green, Roberto, a dapper, thick-haired young man who slept on the floor of his studio in a sleeping bag, had filled the small space with big canvases of swirling green scenes that evoked the local forests. The paintings were built around traditional Mapuche imagery, particularly birds, but updated with twists of barbed wire and swirls of pure primary colors.

“People have forgotten Che,” he said when I showed him a photocopy of the 1952 article. Guevara’s death in 1967 had made him a martyr to Chileans on the left, and at age fourteen Roberto had joined what he called a “Guevarist youth group.” This was a bunch of students and left-wing activists who studied the life and teachings of
their hero. At that point, before the coup, there had been pictures of Che everywhere. “Che had an immense influence in the country,” Roberto said. But after September 1973 his image was suppressed and his teachings largely surpassed or forgotten. Twenty-five free-market years later, the country was “surging in another direction. We’ve moved from social solidarity to commercial solidarity,” Roberto said. Instead of government programs, “Now we have telethons.”

Roberto kept a copy of the multivolume report by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up after the return to civilian government, and he began flipping through the pages of one binder, reading me details of the military repression in Valdivia. Statistically speaking, this southern region was the fourth worst site of repression in the country. This was a kind of perverse tribute to the local people, many of whom believed they had been forging a new era of electoral revolutions, of democratic “people’s power.” Scores of farms in the area had been occupied by peasants, who set up local parliaments and named their communes after Che Guevara. One of the local leaders put on a beret, styled himself as “Comandante Pepe,” and gave suitably fevered statements about seizing power and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat to any journalists who visited his “guerrilla base” (an idle farm decorated with slogans). Inevitably, the fantasies of the left and right began to meet, and Pepe was labeled the Che of Chile. On the day of the coup itself, September 11, 1973, battalion-sized units of soldiers and police instantly closed the mountain passes to Argentina and began rounding up all these left-wing activists. In Panguipulli, just across the flat valley, the military and police detained these peasants and anyone associated even vaguely with the left. Even the leaders of high school student councils were taken, as was the educational director of the region. In Puerto Montt, some people had been summarily executed simply because they were suspected thieves or were involved in personal disputes with military men.

The leftists had misread history, and badly. From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report:

It went on and on. Two days after Silva was arrested, the military took seventeen loggers and unionists to a private farm a little higher in the hills and killed them all. The next day, using a list provided by civilian supporters, a combined unit of police and air force men in the same zone detained sixteen people. They were unionists or members of different peasant organizations. The sixteen were taken at night to a bridge over the Toltén River, which is about half an hour from Valdivia. They were shot in the head and dumped, one by one, into the water.

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:

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.