Obama and the Pain of Chile

When Barack Obama lands in Chile next Monday on a 24-hour visit, something crucial will be missing from his agenda.

There will be succulent seafood and speeches praising prosperity in Chile, bilateral agreements and meetings with the powerful and magnificent, but there are no plans, undoubtedly, that the U.S. president will make contact with what was the fundamental experience in the recent history of Chile: the trauma that the people of my country suffered during the almost 17 years under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet.

The president of the United States should pay tribute to Allende at his grave. Americans were, in large part, responsible for that tragedy.

And, nonetheless, it would not be impossible for Obama to take a look at the past sorrow of Chile. A few blocks from the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, where Obama will be feted by Sebastian Piñera, 120 researchers dedicated themselves to collecting a definitive list of Pinochet’s victims so that some form of reparation may be made to them.

This is the third attempt, since the end of the dictatorship in 1990, to confront the massive losses that it caused. Two officially established commissions had already examined a huge number of instances of torture, killings and political imprisonment, but it became clear, as the years passed, that countless human rights abuses were still unidentified.

And, as a matter of fact, the current investigation has received 33,000 additional requests — horrors that still have not been recorded.

Although Obama does not have the right to read any of the confidential reports about the cases, a few minutes stolen from his strict calendar to talk to some of the men and women who are carrying out investigations would give him more information about the hidden agony of Chile than a thousand books and reports.

He could, for example, speak with a reporter named Tamara. On Sept. 11, 1973, the day Salvador Allende was overthrown, Tamara’s father, one of Allende’s bodyguards, was arrested, without his previous whereabouts ever being known. I worked at La Moneda during the time of the military rioting and I saved my life thanks to a chain of miraculous coincidences; but Tamara’s father was not so fortunate, like many of my good friends whose bodies have still not been laid to rest.

Or Obama could observe the eyes of a lawyer that I know who was kidnapped one afternoon and tortured over a period of weeks before they left him one night in an unknown street so far from his home that he was immediately arrested again for breaking the curfew. Or somewhere around there Obama could talk with an anthropologist who had to go into exile for 14 years, losing her country, her profession, her language, and whose return to Chile was as distressing as the original exile because her children, due to the prolonged absence from the country of their birth, had decided to remain abroad, which means that that family will be forever split.

Or if President Obama feels more comfortable meeting places instead of flesh and bone human beings, he could get to know Villa Grimaldi, a torture house which is now a center for peace, or find 10 minutes to visit the Museum of Memories, where there are exhibits denouncing the terrible past of Chile.

One of the reasons it makes sense for Obama to do everything possible to shine light on, albeit through a dark glass, our vast and devastating sorrow, is that Americans were, in large part, responsible for that tragedy. Washington helped, encouraged and financed the fall of the democratically elected Government of Allende and the dictatorial line of Pinochet.

At a moment in which the upheaval in Egypt, as in so many other countries breaking free from authoritarian oppression, is reminding the world of the consequences of maintaining brutal regimes, it would behoove a president as intelligent and compassionate as Obama to see, up close and personal, some of the men and women who have been destroyed by this policy.

And Chile also offers an example of how difficult it is to confront crimes against humanity — how difficult and also how necessary. In my country we have learned that if our community, our entire population, does not look directly at the frightening past and drag its sorrow to the light, if those responsible are not punished, we run the risk of corrupting our own soul.

It is a lesson that Obama and his fellow countrymen should impose upon themselves. Two years after its installment, Guantanamo remains open and there is no sign that a trial will be put forth for the human rights violations under the Bush administration; nor is there any hint that forgiveness will be asked for from victims. A U.S commission modeling itself after the one established in Santiago could be a first step toward settling scores that, as we Chileans well know, should not be postponed indefinitely.

No matter how important this experience will be for Obama, there is another one that would be even more meaningful. That night he is going to eat dinner in the same Presidential Palace where Salvador Allende died many years ago, defending his country´s right to choose its own destiny. Allende is buried in the cemetery not very far from where the country´s elite will be drinking a toast to eternal friendship between Chile and the United States.

In 1965, during a remarkable trip to Chile, Bobby Kennedy went outside the scrupulous protocol set before him and found himself with dispossessed miners and hostile university students and plunged himself into the problems of the country in order to become familiar with them and to ask himself how to find a resolution. And if Obama decided to follow the example of Kennedy — his idol, Bobby Kennedy — and he went outside the script to do something unprecedented like a visit to Allende’s grave? If he very simply stood in that place, he would be standing before the remains of someone who was, like him, a president elected by the people. If he were to devote a few solitary minutes to him?

It would not be essential that he asked forgiveness or that he expressed remorse for the U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Chile or for having supported Pinochet for so long. That simple gesture would be enough. That tribute to a president who gave his life fighting for democracy and social justice would send a message to Latin America, and to the whole planet for that matter, that would be more eloquent than 50 rhetorical speeches. It would be a sign that perhaps a new era in relations between the United States and its neighbors south of the Rio Grande is truly possible, that the so bitter and unjust past need never return, never, ever again.

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean writer. His latest book is “Americanos: Los Pasos de Murieta”