Memories of Chile in the Midst of an American Presidential
Campaign
by Ariel Dorfman
Day after day over the past three years, as I watched Americans
respond to the terror that unexpectedly descended upon them on September
11th, 2001, the direst memories of Chile and its dictatorship resonated
in my mind. There was something dreadfully familiar in the patriotic
posturing, the militarization of society, the way in which anyone who
dared to be faintly critical was automatically branded as a traitor.
Yes, I had seen that before: "You are either with us or against us." I
had seen it far too often -- national security trumpeted as a
justification for any excess in the pursuit of an elusive enemy.
Who could have imagined that in the United States, with its
independent judiciary, thousands of men could be rounded up in the night
-- many only because of their Muslim religion or foreign nationality --
without recourse to a trial, without even an acknowledgment that they
had been arrested? Who could have dared to suggest that there would ever
be "desaparecidos" in America? And there it was as well, torture
being discussed as a legitimate option to protect a community in peril,
and then being used in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and even obscenely
photographed in Iraq -- yes, there they were again, the depressing
echoes of my Chile.
But worse perhaps than all of this was the erosion of the moral
compass of America, the seeming indifference of the seeming majority to
the suffering of others, the casual acceptance of "collateral damage" as
an unquestioned consequence of the war on "terrorism," the demonization
of an ubiquitous foe who had to be destroyed without second thoughts --
and often without first ones as well; without, in fact, any
thoughtfulness at all. That was far more terrifying than the criminal
attacks on New York and Washington: To realize that the Chile of
strongman Augusto Pinochet was not that far away, not that difficult to
imitate, that it was already hovering in the future and ready to
materialize if we were not vigilant.
I would read the news each morning in my home in North Carolina and
each morning I would feel the same sudden stab of vertigo. Was history
repeating itself yet one more tired time? Could it really be that simple
to corrupt American democracy? Could the citizens of the United States
be so easily twisted and manipulated by their fear?
The answer was, in fact, no, not that easily.
Over the last year, everywhere I have turned in the United States, I
have seen signs of an amazing spirit of resistance, another sort of
better America mobilizing, citizens not moved by dread but by hope, a
vast and plural and creative wave of activism that I had not witnessed
since... well, since the year 1970 when my country elected Salvador
Allende as our President, when gentle armies of my fellow countrymen and
countrywomen took their destiny into their own hands and proclaimed to
the winds of history that it was possible to build socialism using
democratic means, that we did not have to terrorize or persecute our
adversaries in order to free ourselves from oppression.
If the present American campaign for the presidency reminds me of
that revolutionary moment in Chilean history more than three decades
ago, it is not because John Kerry is at all like Salvador Allende or
George W. Bush is a clone of Augusto Pinochet. But there is in the
American air today the trembling prefiguration of the same sort of
enthusiasm, the same conviction that each of us can make a difference,
that history belongs to those who dare to imagine an alternative future.
The world does not have to be the way we found it, the way we have been
told it must remain: a message once sent to everybody by a multitude of
hungry peasants in Chile marching to demand ownership of the land they
had tilled for centuries for the benefit of others; a message
transmitted again today by millions of angry internet subscribers to
Moveon.org in the United States and defiantly announced by a widespread
coalition of progressive American activists who are much more mature
than the protestors of the Vietnam era and, I would wager, far outnumber
them as well.
In Chile back then, as in the United States now, you could feel the
same certainty that the last word has not yet been said.
What I do not quite know is if the new social activism in the United
States has the same staying power as its Chilean counterpart. It took us
almost a century of struggle to elect someone like Salvador Allende to
the Presidency, and when he was overthrown by Pinochet in a military
coup in 1973 -- on September 11th of all days! -- we kept fighting for
seventeen years to rid ourselves of the dictatorship that misgoverned
our land. We did not decide to give up on September 12th.
The real test will therefore come on November 3rd, the day after
George W. Bush crawls back to power or John Kerry rides this wave of
social transformation into the White House. That is when millions of
American men and women who have mobilized in unprecedented numbers over
the last months will be faced with the real dilemma of their times: Are
they to pack up and go home to the old apathy and submissiveness, or do
they deeply understand that, no matter who wins or loses the election,
it depends on them, one by one by one and all together, that their
country never turn into even a semblance of the Chile of Pinochet?
The struggle for the soul of America has barely begun.
Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer, holds the Walter Hines Page Chair
at Duke University. His most recent book Other
Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004 (Seven
Stories Press), a perfect introduction to his work, explores the ways
Americans apply amnesia to their yesterdays and innocence to their
tomorrows. His book Desert
Memories (National Geographic) just won the Lowell H. Thomas Silver
Award for travel writing.
