Can a torture camp ever really become a “Park of Peace”? The Chilean government would like to think so. In a politically polarized country that rarely addresses its troubled past, the transformation of a former prison camp into a memorial to the Chilean leftists who were persecuted there is a truly momentous feat. Yet no physical makeover could possibly hide the alarming purpose for which this camp, the Villa Grimaldi, was constructed.
I had been living in Chile for a month and a half, but despite a human rights class that provided me with a basic understanding of the Pinochet dictatorship, I had seen little visible proof of the crimes the regime had committed: Most Chileans wanted to ignore the truth.
The story of the 3,000 detenidos-desaparecidos, the detained and disappeared, is not as well known as it should be. Between 1973 and 1990, the Chilean population suffered under the dictatorial regime of General Augusto Pinochet, who kidnapped and murdered scores of political prisoners that were accused of being Communist sympathizers. An old male survivor of the regime’s persecution slowly and deliberately led me through Villa Grimaldi. As I walked through the camp, the harsh realities of the Pinochet era became painfully clear to me.
The first thing I saw was a plaque that commemorated the horrors carried out in this place. The message was succinct: “This sight, where today has been raised this park, was only a few years ago a place of torture and cruelty … Each flower, watered with the tears of yesterday, is a firm statement that here, never again, never again in Chile will be repeated the torture.”
I followed the survivor from one painful memory to another. He struggled to speak, releasing his words as they came to him and recalling the horrors he endured. He showed me where prisoners were hung by their feet, submerged in freezing water, locked in narrow closets and subjected to boiling water poured over their bodies.
The most surreal part of my experience was not in learning about the atrocities that occurred at Villa Grimaldi, but rather the conversation I had with my host mother later that day after returning from the former torture camp. When I got home, I rushed into the kitchen, eager to discuss the historical epoch I had just observed with a Chilean, who had lived through this tainted period herself. I was not prepared for the look on Lucia’s face when I told her where I had been that day. She shook her head in disbelief and anger before expressing her disgust at my nerve to even bring up such an unmentionable topic in her home. I soon realized that Lucia was part of the other half of Chilean society, who had supported Pinochet for his economic endeavors and commitment to act against the slightest shadow of Communism. She asked me, “Do you know what it was like to have to stand in line, hoping that I would be rationed enough milk to feed my babies?” Lucia was recalling her life under the Socialist leader Salvador Allende, who was President of Chile from 1970 until he was deposed by the hand of Pinochet and burned to death in La Moneda, the presidential palace.
Lucia was Pinochetista, an unrepentant supporter of the General. While it may seem frightening that she could openly deny the existence of a torture camp so close to her own home, her point of view was held by a significant percentage of Chileans. She had suffered under the old Socialist system, and she prevented me from leaving Chile with a biased opinion. While I did not agree with her, my host mother’s comments represented the harsh duality of the Chilean national memory. The lingering question is to what extent human suffering may be necessary. I left that conversation with my host mother immersed in both sides of the story.
Samantha Friedman is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. She still can’t roll her R’s.
