A Story for Matias

A Story for Matias
Francisco Letelier

Twenty seven years ago in the mountains of Santa Cruz my friend Jorge Hernandez and I saw something unusual in the blue sky. Jorge the son of migrant workers, had grown up moving with his family from one job to another until they settled in Los Angeles, he had worked his way through an education and was now an architect. I was still an art student at Berkeley. We had met working together on migrant education in the summer of 1979.
At that time, we were both necessarily what you might call controlled and even headed young people. He had bought a home in Santa Cruz and worked in a world where the children of migrant field laborers were not commonplace. He needed to keep it together. I was working my way through college and had quite a regimented and work filled life.
But we were young and regular types I guess, and so had smoked some very strong and green marihuana during our hike.We both had also had experiences with a variety of drugs, including LSD and mushrooms.

Over time, I have ascribed what I saw in the sky on that day to my imagination, my poor eyesight, the effect of drugs and the refraction of the sun. It was, after all the best thing to do. Having had a personal history already filled with the stuff and content of spy novels and historical epochs I was not at that time able to assemble myself in any other manner. I had boarded greyhound bus from the east coast and made my way west to art school. It was hard to find a connection with my peers. My father had been brutally killed on the streets of Washington DC, I was not drawn to people who are fascinated or obsessed with bogeys in the sky. Things right here on earth seem mysterious and complicated enough. Yet I have always believed we are not alone. It seems a rational and logical conclusion when confronted with vastness of the night sky and all its possibilities.

Even then I had the notion that people like to think that they have the answers to everything, But life had shown me that there is always more to discover and more to explore. It was what gave me both political and spiritual solace, an optimism born from believing that there were new worlds both within and without waiting to be discovered.

A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary which showed footage of the earth's atmosphere recorded in the infra red spectrum and using high speed shutters. I recognized something chillingly but incontrovertibly familiar. Caught on tape was the luminous cigar shaped objects I had seen long ago, its edges glowing with precise rods protruding from its sides.

My sixteen year old son, Matias has an old cover of a New York City tabloid framed behind glass in his room.
The sensational bold faced headline, 15 YEAR OLD SHOOTS AT WATERGATE BURGLAR.
The shooter is now grown up and she is my son's mother. She told me her version of the story on the day I met her.

I was both shaken and taken. Taken and smitten by her. Shaken or more appropriately pulled in a variety of directions by the story and the details of her life. The man she had shot at was Frank Sturgis, a CIA operative and former colleague of her mothers. He had called Marita and warned her to not testify about things she had witnessed. Monica obtained a 22 pistol from a friend in her apartment building and waited for Frank to appear, she was afraid for her mother. Frank Sturgis was dangerous. His name is associated with Watergate as one of the burglars sent to break into Democratic Headquarters during Nixon's bid for the Presidency. The Watergate scandal was a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. by members of President Richard Nixon's administration and the resulting cover-up which led to the resignation of the President. A number of the perpetrators were from the "plumbers unit", originally set up to "plug leaks," and some were former members of the CIA. The name of Sturgis appears in a slew of other events and situations, which although wrapped in mythology, truly did take place and do exist, Things which seem to be following us tenaciously into our futures.

A few weeks ago hundreds of documents relating to the secret activities of US intelligence agencies were declassified by the US government. I have not had an opportunity to study the documents as of yet. Perhaps I will not be surprised by any of the documents, and perhaps nothing too important has been revealed, but I will look for clues so that I can continue to piece together the story of how my son Matias came to exist, not the only story to be sure and perhaps in many ways not really an important one.
His mother and I did not remain together for too long. Yet today, as things stand, he is both the inheritor of lies and deception as well as the brave responses to the intervened and fragmented history all of us share.

When she was 18 my son's maternal grandmother Marita Lorenz, stowed away on an ocean liner. Along the passage to Southern waters from a New York harbor, the ships captain, Heinrich Lorenz Marita's father discovered her.
Her father was German and had married an American singer and performer prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Like most German citizens Marita's Father was conscripted by the Nazis and captained a gunship in the North Seas during the War. In 1944 her mother was accused, correctly, of being a spy. Marita's mother worked for the OSS, the government agency which was the forerunner of the CIA. She and young Marita were thrown into a concentration camp, where they were quartered until the end of the war.

The ship, the HSS Bremmer, stopped in Cuba. It was February 1959, The early days after the bearded men had come in from the mountains and jungles and defeated Mafia crony and US friend General Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro would board the ships which came to the island, welcoming travelers and winning them over with his flamboyant charm, wit and good looks.
Marita tells the story of how young Fidel squeezed her hand under the table and in effect sealed her fate.
Marita left the island on the ship only to return a few weeks later at Fidel's request. She moved in to the Havana Hilton and became Fidel's mistress.
In those early days of the Cuban revolution, my father, Orlando Letelier also visited Cuba as part of a delegation of Latin American economists led by future Chilean president Salvador Allende. Perhaps the trip did not seal his fate, but it did color the way some would view and consider him. Years later we learned that after that trip the FBI first opened a file on him and our family.
Us intelligence was, to say the least interested in Fidel's Cuba and anyone who had any dealings with the fledgling government.
While Marita lived her young dreams of romance with the dashing Fidel, in the company of historical figures such as Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, she became pregnant with Fidel's child

Things get murky here, the place in the story where things become as problematic as sighting a glowing object in the sky, for now Marita's world becomes the stuff of spy thrillers and classified documents.

She was in her final months of pregnancy when somebody slipped a drug into her milk. In her words 'Everything was a blur; I remember extreme pain. I was in a dark room and I was hemorrhaging.' When she came round, she says, a comrade of Castro's told her that she had been through an induced labor. The baby was alive, he said, but she would have to go back to America."
There were those who were unhappy with Fidel's choice of company. The half German half American young girl was not good for the image of the revolution.
Marita says that when she returned to the United States they were waiting for her, her mother June along with her intelligence contacts in the CIA. Her confused state in the hospital where she was treated for blood poisoning was exploited, Over time she was adopted by a shadowy group of agents known as Operation 40, Lorenz was kept isolated, underfed and prescribed a diet of addictive 'vitamins'. She was led to believe that her baby had been killed, and that Castro had ordered it. When they felt that she harbored enough hatred for her ex-lover, her 'friends' presented a plan: one that, as a bonus, would help protect the American way. 'They gave her two tablets, botulism toxins. The CIA had decided that poisoning was a ladylike way to kill him.'

Operation 40 members had been recruited by the CIA from the Anti- communist Brigade an organization started by Frank Sturgis and financed by what he called, ' dispossessed hotel and gambling owners" and who most of the rest of us usually call the Mafia or organized crime.
Marita's re encounter with Fidel in Havana as she has narrated, is the stuff of legend. They met in the same hotel room they had shared in the past. Fidel unclipped his gun from his belt and said, They sent you here to kill me." He handed her the gun and said, "Go ahead.
They looked at one another and again a smoldering decision was reached and they fell into each others arms.

Marita returned to the US and although she had sorely botched her mission it was decided she was still useful, so they furthered her training. She trained with the men who would be key figures in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. And who continue to turn up in the most likely, unlikely places in history in the future
Around here is where the stories from my son's mothers side of the family and stories from my side begin to interweave, a parallel convergence from opposite sides of the tracks and from this dance, the future looms up as it often does, from tragic but sufficiently buffered and ridiculed places to be almost quaint.

George Bush senior was involved in the planning of Operation 40, it was one of his first tasks as a young CIA operative. Among the men that Marita claims to have met at that time were Luis Posada Carriles, Felix Rodriguez, Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo Sampol, Ignacio Novo Sampol and, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez and E. Howard Hunt and Lee Harvey Oswald. Later Operation 40 would come under the direct supervision of Richard Nixon. At least two of these men The Novo brothers would, years later be involved in the assassination of my father in Washington DC. but mange to elude justice. Another one of these would go on to earn the label of Grandfather of Terrorism. and would work closely with Oliver North during the Iran Contra operations . Lee Harvey Oswald would pass in one version of history as the sole gunman who killed John F Kennedy.

The CIA was busy in other places as well, and these men appear all over the map of the Americas, In Guatemala, In Venezuela, In Chile and other places, sometimes as advisors hidden behind powerful protectors, at other times with alias identities but always leaving a trail where history and mystery where death and lies converge.

On her next mission Marita's cover was as a stewardess, the mark was Marcos Perez Jimenez former dictator of Venezuela. This time she was successful but no killing was involved. She romanced the general and became his live in mistress in his Miami compound. Marita says that at that time she fell in love with Marcos, and perhaps she did, she also claims that she was looking for someone powerful who might protect her from her CIA and intelligence handlers. Around that time my family moved to Venezuela from Chile, my father had lost his job because of his support for Allende a socialist candidate for the presidency. Having helped those who escaped the Perez Jimenez regime in the 50's my father now had friends who had returned to Venezuela who were instrumental in building a new country.
Perez Jimenez had escaped with millions. Marita became pregnant and Monica was born.
They lived with Marcos until he was arrested and deported. The US could not continue to deny the Venezuelan government request of extradition. Around that time my family moved to Washington DC, The US released Perez Jimenez to Spain where he was given asylum by fascist dictator Francisco Franco. On the plane to Spain there was a meeting by US intelligence figures and Perez Jimenez, they would let him keep his money but he would stay silent about US support of his regime. And by the way, they told him, "Marita?" She was one of ours."
Neither Marita or Monica, left behind in the US ever saw the General again.

On the 18 of November 1963, Marita claims, Frank Sturgis, gathered the troops in Miami. Two cars, loaded with rifles and handguns, set forth towards an undisclosed destination. As was often the case, Lorenz was brought along as a decoy, in case any local police needed to be sweet-talked. 'The trip was difficult,' she says. By the time they got to a hotel in Dallas, Marita continues, 'I was really bitching. I had my period, if you want to know the truth. And I wanted to get back to my daughter. Then this hood comes into the hotel and says, "Who's this broad? What is she doing here?" That's when I left, and thank God I did.' A few days later, flying to visit her mother in New Jersey, Marita heard the pilot announce that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Not long after that she watched the live coverage of Ozzy being led away in handcuffs, and recognized Jack Ruby, the man who shot Oswald, as the hood from the hotel.


Last September we marked the thirty year anniversary of my fathers assassination in Washington DC. I was at Sheridan circle on Embassy row where the first known act of international terrorism in the nations capital occurred. My trip coincided with demonstrations to push for the extradition of Luis Posada Carrilles the grandfather of terrorism in the Americas held in Texas pending a series of immigration hearings. He is a man that Marita had known in the early days of her career.
George Bush senior is known to still be friends with some of Marita's other colleagues. Orlando Bosch and Felix Rodriguez. Felix Rodriguez was in 1967 the head of the team that tracked down and killed Che Guevara in Bolivia and along with Luis Posada Carriles a key figure in Iran Contra. They report directly to Oliver North.

In 1976, Bush senior is appointed Director of the CIA, and all anti Castro groups are united into one organization CORU or Commanders of United Revolutionary Organizations. However in 1976 Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch are caught for blowing up a Cuban airliner killing 73 passengers over the island of Barbados and are imprisoned with lifetime penalties by Venezuelan authorities.
That same year my families movements are being watched by men in cars in the quiet cul de sac of our home in Bethesda Maryland just outside of Washington DC.
Chilean secret police agents along with members of CORU and Operation 40 classmate Guillermo Novo Sampol plant a bomb in the family car. The bomb is detonated and the car explodes severing my fathers legs and killing Ronnie Karpen Moffitt a 27 year old co-worker who chokes to death on an embassy row sidewalk with a piece of shrapnel in her throat. Novo and co conspirator Alvin Ross are arrested and found guilty of conspiring to murder my father, but In 1981 they obtain a retrial and are acquitted on a technicality. ...

In 1985 Luis Posada Carriles known as "Bambi" escapes and in a matter of days, he pops up in El Salvador at the side of his mate Felix Rodriguez, to assist him with an operation, now known as Iran-Contra. For convenience they are now Ramon Medina and Max Gomez. At the Llopango airstrip, they are unloading planes with weapons, sending them back to the States with cocaine. Orlando Bosch has to wait a little longer, but he too is released in 1987 as a result of diplomatic pressure from Jeb Bush. Back in Miami, Bosch receives a Presidential pardon, shortly after George Bush climbs to the highest office
In 2000 Luis Posada along with Guillermo Novo and two others are discovered with 200 pounds of explosives in Panama City and arrested for plotting the assassination of Castro, who was visiting the country. But in 2004 Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso a close ally of the United Sates, grants them a pardon. Novo and others arrive in Miami on a US plane to a heroes welcome. Posada Carriles is dropped off in Honduras and from there makes his way North and sneaks into the US aboard a shrimp boat that lands in Florida in March 2005.

Posada is picked up by immigration authorities and although wanted for acts of international terrorism by several countries, he is tried for immigration fraud. Following a series of hearings in a ruling Tuesday May 8 in El Paso, Texas, US District judge Kathleen Cardone, dismissed immigration fraud charges against the Cuban-Venezuelan exile, citing a remarkably mundane reason -- the government's translator had botched the English-Spanish interpretation of Posada's naturalization interview in 2005.
Posada, 79, returned to his home in Miami as a hero of that city's anti-Castro right wing, despite the U.S. government documents made public recently that tied him to terrorist acts.

Marita lives a quiet life now in Queens, New York,

Perez Jimenez died in Spain in 2001, he never returned to Venezuela.

General Augusto Pinochet the former dictator of Chile who ordered my fathers murder and who's head of intelligence Manuel Contreras served a few years for carrying out the order, eluded justice.
On Sunday December 10 General Augusto Pinochet died in Santiago. No State funeral or state mourning was authorized by the government.

My father was first buried in Venezuela with State honors, an offer by his friends who he had met and helped when they were running from my sons grandfather Marcos Perez Jimenez.
When Pinochet was elected out of power in 1990. plans were made to move my fathers remains from Venezuela to the national cemetery in Santiago. The family had decided he would be brought back to Chile only when democracy had been restored.
In 1992 a State funeral was planned. My brother Jose flew to Venezuela on a Chilean plane to supervise the exhumation of his remains. Venezuelan State officials met him at the airport and they drove to the cemetery on a Caracas hillside. A new casket was arranged for the State funeral in Santiago, after all his remains had been in the ground for 16 years The grave was uncovered. Cemetery workers brought up the old casket and brushed the dirt aside. They carefully pried open the box. My brother Jose relates that my fathers body had not decomposed. It looked the same as it had in 1976. His face and hands looked the same.
The workers lifted the body out and put it into its new casket. It was light as air. There was a breeze blowing on the hilltop overlooking Caracas, the city of Bolivar.

There is a large black stone in the Cemetery in Santiago, a stones throw from the grave of Salvador Allende. It which marks the place of my fathers remains, One side is rough the other polished and inscribed with words. I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean, I will die a Chilean.
The words he pronounced at a rally, two weeks before his assassination, when he was informed that the military had deprived him of his nationality and declared him a traitor to his nation.

What is a nation? What is heroism? What is a traitor today? What is a patriot?
History turns in on itself, nothing is inscribed in stone other than the words of those who are no longer here with us.

Matias my son has currents of history within him, both his grandfathers were Andinos, men from the Andes, and it could be said that Marita his maternal grandmother is a woman who's life was stretched into the stuff of legend by the unknown powers of these currents.

I recently told him about my epiphany regarding things in the sky which are yet unidentified.
He didn't bat an eye,
Ufo's? hmmmm. That's nothing Pop.

Francisco Letelier 2007

My Case Against Pinochet

Published on Friday, December 17, 2004 by the Los Angeles Times

My Case Against Pinochet

by Francisco Letelier


When I read that Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 89-year-old former leader of Chile, had been placed under house arrest earlier this week and declared competent to stand trial for his many crimes, it was no abstract issue for me. This was a man, after all, who had a tremendous influence on my life, the man who robbed me of my father, who tore my family apart.

I met him first in the days before the military coup that put him in power. He was a guest for dinner at our home in Santiago, Chile. I was 14 years old. I can see him now in my father's study, the Andes visible in the windows behind him. I remember that he looked strangely disconcerted, amid the bookcases and leather-backed tomes. Perhaps he was already making plans for the future.

Only a few months later, on Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet seized power in a coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Allende died during the coup, and life was turned inside out for my family and for my father, Orlando Letelier, who had served as Allende's ambassador to the United States and later as foreign minister.

In the days that followed, we watched jets fly overhead, heard bombs hit, smelled the smoke. Tanks rolled through the streets.

From the start, Pinochet's government relied on arbitrary arrests and shadowy disappearances; during his 17 years in power, tens of thousands of people were detained and tortured, and thousands killed. We were put under house arrest; my father spent a year in concentration camps, enduring the tortures of Dawson Island, a wind-swept rock off Antarctica. My brothers and I grew accustomed to being followed by secret police agents on the way to school and elsewhere.

After my father's release, we left the country and moved to Washington. But that was not far enough for Pinochet. Because of my father's ongoing work to restore democracy in Chile, Pinochet was determined to stop him — undaunted by the distance or by the national borders that lay between Santiago and our home in suburban Maryland.

Before dawn one morning in mid-September 1976, when I was 17 years old, an American named Michael Townley, acting on orders from Pinochet's secret police, attached a plastic explosive to the underside of the Malibu Classic parked in our driveway just a few feet from my bedroom window.

Everyone in my family used the car. I had driven it to my senior prom. On Sept. 21, any one of us could have turned the key. As it happened, my father drove it into Washington with his colleagues, Ronni Karpen and Michael Moffitt, her husband.

At 9:30 a.m., the bomb shattered the peace of Embassy Row. It severed my father's legs; he bled to death in the charred wreck. Ronni drowned in her own blood on the sidewalk, a piece of metal lodged in her neck. Only Michael Moffitt survived. It was at that time the most brazen international terrorist act ever committed in the nation's capital.

The investigations began immediately, but proceeded at a terribly slow pace. Townley eventually turned state's evidence, gave a detailed confession and served three years and four months in prison. He confirmed that the order for the assassination had come from Santiago.

In 1985, Chile's Supreme Court found Manuel Contreras, the director of the Chilean secret police, guilty of ordering the assassination of my father. He served seven years and was released. Declassified documents show that Contreras received a "one-time payment of $5,000," through which the CIA hoped to gain leverage over him. To date, the CIA has not been directly connected to the murder, though many questions remain unanswered about the agency's role in Chilean politics.

Several other men conspired in the assassination but have continued to elude justice. One of these was Guillermo Novo, who was convicted in Washington of conspiracy in the killings and sentenced to 40 years but whose conviction was overturned on a technicality. He later went to prison in Panama for his role in a plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but in August, as the U.S. presidential election was approaching, Novo was released. With three other known terrorists, he boarded a plane to Miami, where he was admitted to the country by U.S. officials and welcomed by Florida's Cuban exile community.

And Pinochet? In August, 31 years after the coup, the Chilean Supreme Court made a historic decision to strip him of his immunity from prosecution.

Pinochet has been accused of participating in Operation Condor, an intelligence-sharing network used by six South American dictators of that era to eliminate dissidents. My father's murder was a Condor mission.

On Monday, Chilean judge Juan Guzman ordered Pinochet placed under house arrest and declared him fit to stand trial. "It is not a part of American history we are proud of," conceded Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in 2003 when asked to comment on the U.S. role in Chile in the 1970s.

Until the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism was, for many Americans, something they watched on television. Now there are many more people who, like me, have lost members of their families to terrorism. We continue to search for a long-awaited measure of justice. Our heroes emerge from courtrooms, from smoldering wreckage and fallen towers.

Justice in these cases must go beyond the incarceration of individuals. The true historical record should be made public and U.S. foreign policy must reflect the lessons learned.

I hope that a public trial of Augusto Pinochet will serve as an important step, and that it will lead to the re-energizing of the long-dormant Letelier case in the U.S. It is here in this country where the facts remain shrouded and where individuals involved in the tragic murders of my father and Ronni Karpen remain untouched.

Francisco Letelier is an artist based in Venice. His father was assassinated in Washington when he was 17 years old.

© 2004 LA Times

Five Poems

Five Poems- Francisco Letelier

Before The Thunder

Before the thunder
There were voices
Before the smoke
Before the tide
There were voices rising

Thunder
Now all through the old lands
Thunder shaking
Night winds howling

Do not rise thinking
It is the first time
There were voices singing in the fire
Before time was measured

From the cradle of our world
Out of history and scripture

Long before the ships
There was dirt and stone
No one hunted in the kings forest but the few
There was dirt and stone
The moon would roundly rise to
circles and hardened hands

Hands which cut the trees
Hand which shaped the ships dark ribs
Which coiled hemp and caught the wind
Caught the wind across the water

Hands for chains and gold
New world waiting for the voices
That will claim it.
Long before the jazz came
hip hopping across the floor, hardened hands beat chains around ankles and wrists
Long before quarters in my pocket
Jingled like 50 occupied States
Long before slot machines
A world of songs and names
Nation thundering
In rivers and distances
Crisscrossed by travelers and trader

Before the flag, the hands of women sewing
Before the melting pot
Before the colony
Before the relocation
Before the west was imagined
Before California was golden
Before the bus went west
Cobblestones and furrowed earth

Within the white palace
It is not the children of Washington,
not the children of Jefferson
Not the children of the singing land
It is not the country
Not the heart
Not the new deal
Not the liberty bell

It belongs to you.
The stars which cover you at night
make a shelter for your dreams
Waving bravely
Can you see,
the rockets glare was never
meant to blind your eyes.

My lucky charms
Reverberate through time
We the people
Can write other declarations

Do not rise thinking
It is the first time
There were voices singing in the fire
Before time was measured

Before the thunder
There were voices
Before the smoke
Before the tide
There were voices rising.


The Woods

Little fairy children laugh in the woods
And Mother Manzanita spreads large arms over them
But here little boys go to sleep in squalor
In a nest they never chose
Old stones burnt by wood fires
Carry the imprint of weavers hands and prayers
But fumes from diesel and nitrate operations
Seep in to sleepers dreams and grow mutated nodes

Laughter is echoing in my dreams and dappled glens
the filtered sunlight seem cruel
For those who are dumb, deaf and blind
Hunger is not a choice
some are blinder than those whose eyes
grow cataracts in toxic fumes
For the money that it takes to buy a clean apple
Others give a family wheat and tea
A belly full is all you need when there is no possibility of tomorrow

Simply living in the miracle of another day
But a halting cutting breath can be a curse
Wishing peace for those who inherit parched earth
Is not enough
These are the little gods
Tattered and living on the street
They never learn the way of OM and never see the trees

Others make a home where fruit grows ripe
and spoils on the ground

Far away is long away
Airline tickets cost a life of back breaking work
There is no return home
I speak your language and share your streets
But have no map out of the maze

Laughter echoes bouncing off the concrete
A loving man lays his pregnant wife to sleep
On a pallet of cardboard
Down the street
Smartly dressed
Others enter into a scented room
And go within


Those I follow

Those I follow do not always dress in white,
they get dirty; hands calloused
menial and arduous,
spinning and carrying.
Those I follow only sometimes, breathe deeply
the shallow breaths which surround the more prolonged ones
are enough,
to rise above the dust on the streets
and make the world

Abandoning one occupying the other, we get lost
The mind and heart are not separate homes
follow both trails, feel at last
allowed to shine
cleverly crafted, after hard thinking
allowed to shine, outlasting, everlasting,
the incessant churn of history and magazine.

Brilliant child of life, earth citizen,
exercise the right,
Shine Singingly
withering the layers, the encasements
wail away the wrappings
shine
Do not sit in this
brief minute of history
without having your case heard,
shine

Freed to wander continents,
Pulsing and alive despite the leaders laws
Incorporate behind a cloud, make it rain
Nothing wrong if the bell rings
brilliant coins dance as
anklestrail small currents in the cracks.

Shine
coming in the years of song,
makes the flowers bloom
apple pie, the flag
Mineral antelopes – geysers, thundering on the plains
working routes across the minds of the nation
sending real words of human intelligence
we are the real and the strong
beautiful for all our songs, we are the rising wave of grain.

Birth

I was born in a crystal spring,
given tar to drink.
Broken and forged anew
Born into a treaty
so we may be like them,
maybe like them

Born out of a now silent assembly line
Born into a life where I would remain
Quite, safely faceless
Born into a history where all the best have disappeared into deep pockets.

Born in a hard place of mountains and stone
Never meant to be alive
Number, cypherstitous phantom
Born into a seething rage, could not stand in silence
Could not breathe deep enough
Could not hear the jingles
Over sounds of crushing bones.

Despite the turning tide of chanting
Despite the hundred monkeys
Rising up in me, the only divinity
I can buy or touch or eat,

No one planned I might be useful
Nobody thought I could sing
Born in a war which swallows tongues and days

Born in the middle of the freeway
Helicopters racing alongside
Pulled over as I caught my first breath
raging and tattered on the street
Born following a missile across the sky
Born right along the fire,
which eats the children's bread.

Born behind the close door
Shaped into the murmur of waves
Trapped under laws and concrete
Tremoring out between the tides,
floating endless ocean
feeding on microscopic flotsam.

Born a tumbled jewel
Swirling sand and grit
Born the pearl
Encased and appointed
in stubborn beauty.


Inside Where Our Songs Hide

Inside the inside where our songs hide
Everyone inherits a world they did not choose
History weighs on rough elbows
water carriers, rock breakers
In the whistling Doppler
children huddle
telling stories in the dark
Sitting underneath the heavy furniture
You might remember listening for the footsteps
That make you hold your breath
Sshhhhhhhhhhh
They’re coming for grandfather
Even though his ghost abandoned the rubble many years ago
Everyone inherits a world they did not choose,

Inside, all of us carry the children
Little faces and hands singing
History is a mother
leaving many at the doorsteps of strangers
who do not answer.
High barriers and broken lines
Where our songs hide
It’s a small world after all.
Late summer sidewalks echo games
names written
in colored chalk on the streets
cousins dancing in the brilliant light of day
we are there, raining down, far away,
I win, you win, its a draw
You lose I lose we all lose
Changelings all
Dropped into uncomfortable beds
The night light burnt out long ago

In the dark you can hear bulldozers and machines
Building a careful future of safety and barriers
The children meet undercover
exchanging curls and bread, olives and grapes
nothing stops the inside
inside where our songs hide
We are carrying the children
in a vessel of embers

Inside the songs born in children
We are gathered in a circle
knit tightly now around the earth.
Voices and communication devices
instantly replaying vowels and notes

Looking for us
So that we might let them know
It’s all right now
Go ahead
The dead have been laid to rest
Memories guarded and honored
Wall torn down
No one will come in the dark
Go ahead bring it up from the inside
Of the inside
Go ahead and sing.



On the edge

My love
the winds are stronger now
Twisting desert sands howl in the dark
there are clouds of smoke and dust.
On the edge of the parched lands
my love,
the fields are on fire.
There are people out there
searching for
a way away.
The winds are stronger now,
in this place of roaring winds
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
I am one grain of sand
a secret twisting universe,
the smaller you become, the larger the world.
Distance fills things and I wander through a galaxy
Of fires and unmade beds

In the movement of trucks
In the swirling of soldiers, I am a stray dog living on the edge.
My heart is small and it fills with great wonder,
inside the ruins I hear children calling out,
I hear laughter.


Turning

Along the way
When we turn towards the hard place,
where there is no road and things get hard,
small lights appear,
begin a crossing of synapses and rivers
Sparks flash, embers glow

Looking down at our hands along wrists and forearms
Capillaries and veins pulse with pilgrimage
Things set into movement
Magnetized, nano impulses, micro fibers twitch twitch
Listening to the grace, responding from the sleep of hibernation

Along the way
walking towards the places we are needed
The wind picks up, small electrical currents form
Ion charged polarities are exchanged
Almost orphaned, long forgotten limbs
Awaken within us

The dust of our footprints is stirred up,
starts making trouble
Spreading spores and pollen
Mud bones and sex
Bees start buzzing
Car alarms going off in Doppler waves as we pass

The painful intelligence we carry
Working, churning, unfolding like a dandelion
spreading spores and pollen
Grasping onto birdsongs, moths, a sudden wind
Hitchhiker riding in on the daily grind

Along the way
Small things coalesce and something changes
The enchantment of walking towards the territory of untamed intelligence
Imagining a better place and getting busy
Crossing borders, a gypsy gene, elusive and interplanetary
It can enter anywhere

It knows what to do,
Along the way it shows us how
Carrying chains and crack and histories pain
With fire and lightning,
With physics and ordering systems
known and unknown

In the simple places, in the castles
Along the way
it comes to us
Stirred up
where there is no road and things get hard,
Sparks flash, embers glow
It can enter anywhere
Along the way it shows us what to do.

Francisco Letelier

Remembering Martin Luther King

Speech given at rally for tenants of Lincoln Place Apartments, Venice CA.
After several years, tenants overturned illegal evictions and were allowed to return to their homes. The years old struggle continues.

We gather today remembering Martin Luther King, a name which reverberates through history. In some places his example, his will, and his legacy is perhaps felt more strongly than in others. Dr King I am sure is with us here today.
Today, here in this place it may not be an easy task to feel that we have the power to shape our destinies. It is difficult to grasp a connection between the lessons of history and the realities of the present day. Determination, unrelenting will, hope and faith are not easy to find when our most basic needs and rights are disappeared and refused.
We found ourselves here in that long and relentless struggle, a struggle which goes on despite the victories of the past, despite the heroic journey of the man we honor and remember today.
All over this country and throughout the world there are those who like us here today surely are legitimate inheritors of the principles and legacy of Dr King. In the future we will feel the power of the actions and decisions of those who have stood before power here at Lincoln Place. Stood as women and men, as citizens endowed with rights which cannot be erased by faceless decision makers and powerful economic interests.
We are connected to others throughout time and geographies, who are ignored, who’s human rights are disregarded.
Last fall I worked with Rev. Joseph Lowery, Cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King. We stood on Capitol Hill with representatives of many faiths and nations to demand an end to torture. As we prayed on the steps of the Capitol and Reverend Lowery gave us a blessing I looked through the crowd and grasped the enduring and difficult path each one of us had traveled to come together with others there at the seat of power in this nations capital. Each of us had felt alone, experienced loss, lost the elusive grasp on the power to shape our histories. All of us had experienced a dark night, had seen our rights and needs refused and had with difficulty grasped at the elusive qualities of determination of hope and faith.
But on that day we had come together and for a moment broken free above our troubled personal geographies and had a glimpse of our power, of our place in history of the meaning of our collective struggles for freedom and basic human rights. In moments such as those we are touched by grace. Here today we are also touched by this same power. The grace which carried marchers in Selma, the grace and courage that comes to those who understand that struggles for justice are often carried out by a handful of people who work against powerful forces and feel isolated and alone.
The truth is that the tenants here are not alone, they are carried by history and legacy, they are not isolated, more and more people are understanding what this struggle here means. This struggle is for all of us.

Resonance / The nation without borders.

Francisco Letelier

Lectures given in
Eugene Oregon: Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America: Lessons from the Past and Prospects for the Future (30 years after September 11th, 1973)
University of Oregon; Eugene,
Berkeley, California: Septiembre en la Memoria, 30 years of the Chilean 9/11. La Peña.



Resonance / The nation without borders.

One of my earliest recollections is that of women sobbing together in the kitchen, as a small TV showed the coffin of John F Kennedy being wheeled through the mall a few miles from the house we were in.
Inside the house there was the smell of Chilean food and wine.
My mother played the guitar and my father would often join her in the songs they had brought from Chile.
But they had a passion for the things they were discovering in the North and so they added other music, folk songs, songs from the rural American south, work songs. I never felt like I was losing my roots, because of living here in Gringo-land, instead, I was raised in a home where naturally we lived in many nations at once.

My father passed through phases during which he would impose strict Spanish only rules at home, or prescribe readings from Chilean history; and he would send us home for vigorous reality checks.
Aquamarine oceans, snow capped volcanoes, horses, oxen, bread lines, cardboard shacks, dirt floors, barefoot children on crowded buses, street markets and the smell of cilantro and bread crowd my memories of those visits home.

In 1970 after Salvador Allende won the elections, we returned home. We had barely landed when we turned right back around and returned to the States where my father Orlando would serve as Chile’s Ambassador.

At some point, during the time my family lived in the Embassy in early 70’s Henry Kissinger dropped by for a cocktail reception. I was only twelve, and had just a vague notion of who he was, but the staff and my mother seemed rather tense. During these affairs my brothers and I would peek over the edge of the second floor balconies and catch glimpses of the guests. I remember listening for Kissingers voice, and peeking down towards the glitzy looking crowd.

Meeting the guests was easy enough, by that time we had been properly trained in the protocol of such occasions. I remember big hands and cologne, polite questions and encouraging chuckles. Mr.Kissinger at that time to me was just another man in a suit, but later I learned he was a clever, cruel and devious suit.
Shaking my hand, he may have recognized my young voice from the wire taps and surveillance instruments that were surely in operation at the time. He may of known about the girls I liked, my best friends, about the secrets I would innocently whisper into the phone.

Sometimes I have this fantasy about Henry Kissinger. In it, he suddenly remembers a young boy looking up
at him, shaking his hand. A disturbing worry grows in his mind. Years have passed and he has had a couple of close calls. The Homeland security/ 9/11 thing has not worked out too well.
That Horman thing, that just won’t go away, and those devious world justice people. He begins to wonder about what has happened to the young ones; whether they’ve grown up and grown teeth; a nagging suspicion grows: maybe the problem didn’t stop with the killing of the fathers. He cancels his Mexican vacation, the conference in Spain, and wonders how long his actions will echo in time-

We returned to Chile in 1973, - history was catching up to my childhood. In a few months I was to awaken to another side of country. In those months before the coup I experienced a society which for the last 30 years has served as a model of possibility for my generation. Trabajos voluntarios were community service days and through them I got my first chance to work with muralist brigades on the streets. Social barriers were being broken, and the Unidad Popular represented the heart of the country .With workers and friends we attended t meetings at my school in support of the government. Everywhere Chile was awakening we made music, poetry, organized and worked. On September 4th along with millions of other Chileans we marched on the streets of Santiago in support of the Popular Unity. I cherish the fact that I opened my eyes to social struggle there on the downtown streets of Santiago on that day ,clinging to the branches of a tree close to the presidential palace as ‘el chicho’ Salvador Allende spoke to us. The speech echoed through the streets as his voice was transmitted on the loudspeakers set up on the corners- We were drunk that evening with triumph and poder popular- ‘popular power’ I lay awake in bed and I could still hear the words of Allende echoing inside my head, as I became aware I was swimming in living history.

On September 11th our world was turned inside out. We watched the Hawker Hunter jets fly over us, heard the bombs hit the Moneda, smelled the smoke. We thought my father had died – We burned books in the fireplace -Soldiers arrived, we were put under house arrest, harassed, threatened- children were not excused- there were bodies and shootings and tanks rolling through the streets.
They took my father prisoner and he spent a year in concentration camps, including Dawson, a remote island, 300 miles from the Antarctic Circle where he spent six months as a ‘prisoner of war’.
Orlando played the guitar. On Dawson he was allowed to sing to his fellow prisoners. He sang old songs: tangos cuecas, and sambas, but also, new songs learned from other places in the world. His fingers were broken at the camp.

One day my father was pulled out of prison and put on a plane that would take him into exile. Again we returned to Washington DC, where both my father and mother, Isabel worked to restore democracy in Chile.
Augusto Pinochet decided Orlando and others had to be silenced. Agents were sent from Chile to conduct surveillance on him. In the preceding years in Chile we had become accustomed to being followed, to having our phone calls and mail monitored. In the year after the coup we became familiar with the bored and angry secret police that would follow my brothers and I through the streets. We then concluded that we would live openly and without secrets. We were not the criminals.

In the weeks before the assassination we had a family meeting and decided we would continue to support my fathers work against the Junta - there had been more death threats and ominous phone calls.
We later learned that agents from Chile, at this time, were contacting members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement, men trained by the CIA in order to carry out orders from Santiago. One of their bosses,Manuel Contreras the head of the DINA and close friend of Pinochet was on the CIA payroll at the time.

During a historic concert at Madison Square Garden, Orlando learned that the Chilean military government had stripped him of his nationality. The military rulers considered him a traitor. Days before the decree, he had played a crucial part in blocking an important package of loans to Chile.
His reply - I was born a Chilean- I am a Chilean- I will die a Chilean- is carved on the stone which now marks his grave in the National Cemetery in Santiago. His words echo and resonate today -

There is trinity of gentlemen who have played similar roles in our lives. Henry Kissinger, Augusto Pinochet and Michael Townley. For these men, the resonance of those they have murdered is particularly disturbing.

Townley, the American hit man working for Pinochet and the DINA, the secret police, cased the family home when I was seventeen and before dawn a few feet away from my window and, attached a bomb of plastic explosive under the baby blue Malibu Classic, parked in the driveway. I think of him as an evil tooth fairy, Santa Claus on crack and terrorist state pathologies. Prowling outside, crawling under the car a few feet away from the breath escaping my lips. Townley prowled within a fragile and limited world which at that very moment I imagined warm and golden . It had been the summer of Crosby Stills and Nash, Victor Jara and Quilapayun , the psychadelic and benign Led Zeppelin months of my adolescence. Townley and his
anti- communist terrorist Cuban allies sat in cars on the street leading down to the house. I imagine walking by them in the morning on the way to school. I imagine what they felt as they saw us come by listening for our noices, snatches of conversation. Little communists.

Resonance
In 1987, Townleys buddy , Major Armando Fernandez Larios pleaded guilty to being an accessory to the 1976 car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier, He served five months of a seven-year sentence. Fernandez Larios is still wanted in Chile on criminal charges for his alleged involvement in the Caravan of Death, a military squad acting under orders from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Chile has filed an extradition request with the U.S. Department of Justice. The retired Chilean army major, faced a civil trial in a Miami court just weeks ago for the torture and death of Winston Cabello the director of economic planning for two of Chile's northern regions during the Allende government. The civil jury awarded 4 million dollars in damages to the Cabello family, and found Armando Fernandez Larios, in his role as a member of the Caravan of Death liable for all torts alleged:crimes against humanity, extra judicial killing, torture, and cruel,inhumane and degrading treatment. . Townley who served a short time in prison and then received a new identity from the FBI after agreeing to testify against his co terrorists may be feeling nervous about Fernandez Larios., The Argentine government has requested the Major’s extradition three times for his role in the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires. Townley worked with Fernandez on this and several other murders.

In 1976 September rolled around again, Chile was more present than ever, filled with art and words and poetry and music. My father and mother danced cueca in the backyard at a gathering for our national holiday on September 18th.

The memory of a free Chile could not be silenced through distance or decree, so other measures had to be taken. On September 21, 1976, as my father drove with his colleagues Ronnie Karpen and Michael Moffitt, a few blocks from the White House, a bomb shattered the illusion of a calm and peaceful Embassy Row. It was the most brazen international terrorist act ever committed until then in the nations capital. The bomb severed Orlando’s legs; he bled to death in the charred wreck. Ronnie escaped onto the sidewalk and drowned in her own blood from a piece of metal which had lodged in her neck. Only Michael, escaped from the smoldering wreckage.
.

On that day when we returned home from the hospital with the crushing darkness of the murders, the FBI was waiting to talk with us. One by one we were called over to our neighbors living room. The neighbor, it turned out was an FBI man and he had been keeping an ‘eye’ on us. Even he however had apparently slept through the nights of quiet men parked in cars, smoking cigarettes, yards away, making plans to kill.

They insisted on my fathers connections to Cuba and the Russians, they spoke of jealous lovers and the explosives he may have been carrying. A few hours after my father’s death, the blood and bits of flesh still glistening on Massachusetts Avenue, the g- men were doing their job. One by one everyone in the family gave them the same answer. “We know who did it. It was the Chilean Secret Police under orders from Pinochet.” At that time George Bush was the head of the CIA.

Resonance
Guillermo Novo Sampoll, one of the anti-castro cuban assassins who participated in my fathers murder is one of the four terrorists scheduled to go on trial in Panama this month for planning to kill Fidel Castro and hundreds with him during a scheduled appearance of the Cuban leader.

In the days before Orlando was killed the idea of Chile had overflowed into the hearts and minds of many Americans and millions around the world. Songs had sped through continents and our geography of human warmth ,our struggle and human rights been recognized. Chile flew in a million pieces across the globe but each part had carried a story, it seemed, which ignited hearts wherever it went.

General Pinochet was a guest for dinner in our home in Santiago in 1973. My father was Minister of Defense at the time and we had been assigned a driver and a maid through the armed forces. The staff seemed nervous and anxious before dinner. By this time, adept at the greeting of honored guests I remember trotting out to meet the “General.” He reminded me of a big huaso,, someone from the country like my Uncle Ramon from San Alfonso. But unlike others who found them endearing, I found his blue eyes chilling and sinister. Later, after Pinochet killed Salvador Allende and put my father and thousands of others in concentration camps, the house staff became our jailers, monitoring our house arrest and reporting back to their superiors.
I can see the general, the Cerro San Cristobal rising in the windows which frame him. He is looking upset in my fathers study, amidst built-in bookcases and bound leather-backed tomes. I understand his distress, my father had a varied and interesting mind, from economics to philosophy the library reminded the general of precisely what he did not know anything about. Worst than this however, it was clear that the study not only belonged to a man who read books,but to a man who studied and understood them. A man, who like him had started out in the military but who had grown up and put away childish things.
Like Townley, Pinochet walked through the confines of our lves and cased our home. A spy looking for anything incriminating, a scrap of useful information, the better to smear you with, the better to torture you my dear, the better to kill you with. Waiting, patient like a virus. Waiting for the moment he would be the man with the books and the power.




There is a remarkable record of Henry Kissinger’s conversation with Augusto Pinochet when they met for the first time. It underlines the moral approval which the United States was willing to give corrupt rulers who followed certain ideological lines. I think of Saddam Hussein, who at one time was given this same kind of approval in the name of strategic interests.
Henry Kissinger, commended the General on his successful stalking and elimination of the same men he had been stalking and attempting to fool for a few years. It takes one to know one. The statesmen discussing strategies of domination,

After my father was killed, with my brother Jose and I, both young artists with other young Chileans in Spanish Harlem created the Brigada Orlando Letelier, a cultural collective which created murals in what became known as the Chilean Style. I turned 18 and boarded a bus,which brought me to the West coast. With Jose and Chilean artist Rene Castro we began to make community murals and traveled doing solidarity work. Some of the places we created these murals seem mythic to me now and form a vital part of our histories and the struggles of the Americas.

. When I first returned to Chile after ten years of exile, I joined with fellow artists of many generations creating spontaneous political night art events as we quickly unfurled along the walk streets and benches of downtown Santiago, rolls of beautiful resistance images quickly stenciled on newspapers. There were candles and leaflets. The police (carabineros) and soldiers would come and sometimes we would stand a little bit more of ground. There were guns and dogs and chemical bombs, we were afraid of torture and death, but it didn’t matter, people would show up, would come to walk and shout and be taken away. Many who returned during those years were not as fortunate as I was.
When I returned to the United States I visited with family friends Veronica de Negri and her son Rodrigo Rojas and told them about my experiences. Rodrigo, a young photographer, went back a few months later. During a demonstration where Rodrigo was taking photographs, him and a friend were taken prisoner by a group of soldiers who later doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. Rodrigo died. His friend Carmen Gloria Rojas was severely burned and disfigured. She continues her struggles for justice today; the death of my friend Rodrigo is one of the many smoldering and unanswered injustices that still exist today


There are many Chileans like myself. Some have lived large parts of their lives outside of the national borders but have carried a sense of country, culture and belonging throughout those years. During the Pinochet dictatorship, it is estimated that approximately one million Chileans left Chile. Exile communities were established throughout the planet. We learned how to talk to the world we joined in the struggles facing so many of us all over the planet.
Today I live in the same nation created for me when I was a child, a nation without borders .


I know the history of my nation includes the true roles of men like, Kissinger, Townley, Pinochet.
As far as the children of those who have been killed, the teeth I have grown are eye teeth. Long and hard they are helpful for sharp vision- I know that for every insight and lead I may have into the classified lives and activities of these men, there are, no doubt, more disturbing and real secrets.

History is a fragile web, constructed out of slanted observations and short term goals, at least it can be and these men know this better than anyone. Pinochet while visiting Maggie Thatcher, and hobnobbing with the power ‘smart set’ in London is imprisoned for genocide against humanity. These things can happen.
I imagine campaigns pushing for congressional inquiries into weapons of mass destruction and Watergate -like, Nixon lie -like, wall market crash- like, an Enron smelling aroma- can almost drift into scent.
Long teeth for patience and cunning, hard for holding truth and memory
for my family, and for the families who did not bury the remains of those they loved,
for a not a shred was ever found.
For the entire villages and families which disappeared -In Indochina, Iraq, Guatemala, throughout the world humanity and culture, evolution gone in an afternoon of
be all you can be advertising, and big chopper napalm
For the twin towers and Israel for Iraq and the fragile world.
Cunningly strategically, collectively, patiently
with great will, with determination,
creating the laws which will end impunity for crimes against humanity.

Resonance
Last September, the family of Chile's former Army Commander, Rene Schneider filed suit against Henry Kissinger and others in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing them of plotting the general's 1970 kidnap and assassination.

Last November, 11 victims who suffered human rights violations the 1973, brought a suit against Henry Kissinger in a federal District Court in the District of Columbia, for, among other things, crimes against humanity, forced disappearance, torture, arbitrary detention, and wrongful death.

Echo
A criminal suit was filed in Santiago on September 11, 2001, against Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former CIA Director Richard Helms, ex CIA Associate Director Vernon Walters, the former dictators of Argentina, Jorge Videla; Bolivia, Hugo Banzer; Paraguay, Alfredo Stroessner; and Chile, Augusto Pinochet.and others for masterminding and running Operation Condor. Under Operation Condor in the 70s and 80s, government agents in the countries of the Southern Cone colaborated in the torture, killing or disappearance of dissidents and critics.
My father’s murder was a Condor operation

The same week the lawsuit was filed in Santiago, Chilean judge Juan Guzman sent a rogatory letter to Kissinger to inquire about the murder of U.S. journalist Charles Horman, executed by the Chilean military in September 1973.

There is a river running through the heart of the Americas which runs into the rest of the world.
This year I will continue the work of my father inspired by the examples of Dr. Salvador Allende, of Rodrigo Rojas, Ronni Karpen Moffitt and so many other friends and heroes.

I am fortunate to continue building upon the legacy of the Unidad Popular. Upon solidarity, upon collectivity, linking to the diverse cultural fronts throughout the world which hold the keys for a universal extension,
a globalization, of human rights, self determination, the means to livelihood, health, safety.

Resonance
This past June, a French judge announced the conclusion of an investigation that led to the indictment of Pinochet and other Chilean military officials for the disappearance of French citizens in Chile. The French court has issued international arrest warrants for Pinochet. Under French law, Pinochet can be tried
and convicted in absentia.

In April, Gen. Manuel Contreras, the head of Pinochet's secret police was sentenced to 15 years in prison in connection with the disappearance of a dissident. In 2001, he completed a seven-year term for giving orders to assassinate my father. Meanwhile, Chilean judge, Juan Guzman continues legal proceedings which will strip Pinochet's immunity from prosecution in order to interrogate him as part of the investigation into the murder of Eugenio Berríos. Berríos, a chemist for Pinochet's secret police, fled Chile after being called to testify before the Chilean courts about the murder of my father. In 1995, Berríos' body washed up on a Uruguayan beach, hands tied, with bullet wounds to the head.

Our heroes and stories recognize that if we place ourselves right in that spot in the river where the water is deep and dark, where the current is strong and the water surges, we can gather forces and move swiftly and true throughout the world. The river recognizes boundaries and nations as matters of convenience, but, the river, it was here long ago, and it will continue to move us in time, along natural and intelligent currents which carry us all.
Lets continue to hold up history and life as we have always done.
talk to one another and know, that sooner than later –
great avenues of liberty and justice have opened
we must continue to make a way for free women and men
so that they may be able to construct a better society, a better world.

The promise of Chile and the search for global social and economic justice is resonating.From the hardest places we rise and humanity sings.
We have to continuing rising now, in Chile, and throughout the world.
Letting what is natural
what is human and just,
rise up
Waiting for the echo to reach us
so that we can catch the resonance of our history
still rushing like a river,
rising up to meet us. -Francisco Letelier

Kissinger in Context - Whittier College 2007

Kissinger In Context

"In 1973, Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to negotiate a cease-fire in Vietnam. In the same year, Kissinger helped oust Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile. The coup led to a brutal military regime which left in its wake thousands of victims, between those assassinated, tortured and forced into exile, and the many more victims by extension, still mourning the family members and friends they lost to the Pinochet government’s repression.

Kissinger’s legacy is thus a complex one, much like the complexity of the Cold War itself. This was an era that, for Cold Warriors on either side, embodied an ultimate conflict between good and evil, humanity and inhumanity, and that therefore justified even the most inhumane measures in the pursuit of victory. It was “cold” only for those at a distance; for those caught in the middle, the Cold War was very real, and absolutely scorching. "


Francisco Letelier Kissinger's War

So what happens after thirty years?
What happens to the survivors and the children?
A lot of different things. Some are hard to get clarity about, others are easier.

I return to the events in Chile and the death of my father over and over again. Understanding that although many of us have found a way to remake our lives and some to live committed to making a better world. Our lives, the lives of our parents, the live of our children have been altered, we have experienced a loss which can never be restored. We can mend and heal, find strength and hope, but the severity of what happened to us, our nation and those we loved can not be diminished or dismissed.

A quote from Henry Kissinger was printed at the end of an obituary written for Augusto Pinochet . It seems that he has chosen this as his best explanation for his involvement in the internal affairs of another nation and his support of the military regime headed by Pinochet.

“Today that the Cold War is over it's easy to forget what the Cold War was like. We thought rightly or wrongly, we were in a life and death struggle with the Soviet Union as a functioning global system. We were not simply engaged in an abstract philosophical debate about the virtues of Communism versus Democracy.


This is an admirable statement, truly vintage doublespeak, it says hey man we did it for you. It was war. but its in the past, thank god. We were doing the best we can and because of that we should not be judged .

To this day Mr Kissinger claims that United States intervention in other countries was justified by the threat that they might follow in Cuba’s footsteps. Think of it, that small island off the coast full of communists. Such a threat.

as many of you know
According to declassified documents that anyone can read on the National Security Archive website, Kissinger, Nixon, and CIA Director Richard Helms ordered a coup even before Allende assumed office. Kissinger and Alexander Haig worked out the details, described in an October 15, 1970, memo. "It is the firm and consistent policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," wrote CIA Deputy Director of Plans Thomas Karamessines, who coordinated the operation. "We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden."

They believed there was a threat to Chileans and to the national security of the United States because of the things Allende might do: threaten the press, put people in jail, close Congress. These things never happened. But after Pinochet came to power and these things and more did happen, Mr Kissinger had the following to say to Pinochet when they met
" In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. "
How do men like this arise in contemporary history and how is it that they manage to use the power of their office to disregard human life in a manner that goes exactly against Mr Kissingers remark that “We were not simply engaged in an abstract philosophical debate about the virtues of Communism versus Democracy.”

Obviously we Chileans and others were abstracted . The thinking had to do with empire, power and resources. It had little (I am being generous) or nothing to do with people, their lives and their feelings.

When you boil it down, history has to do with feelings and emotions, and we live in a time that has tried to makes life and humanity about other things. But after thirty years and after Pinochets death I can tell you honestly that feelings and emotions are what make the world turn.

*“It is what sets us apart and it is what brings us together. We are born feeling, we live feeling and die feeling”

“So bear with me, we know about Mr Kissingers much touted IQ, but what do we know about his EQ? emotional intelligence
how well does he know his emotions? How much at
home is he with them?
What did he do in the past when fear or anger arose. And what does he do today when shame and sadness arise?
Certainly Mr Kissinger can be regarded as emotionally illiterate.
Emotional illiteracy – or a lack of emotional sensitivity, understanding, and savvy – is largely rooted in the historical (and still commonplace) devaluing of emotion relative to cognition.
It is still quite common to view emotions as
being lower or more primitive than reason, muddying objectivity and important thought processes.”

*“Toward Emotional Literacy” Robert Masters
The Crucible of Awakening

Looking back into the policies implemented by Mr Kissinger on a global scale there is a fog. Motivated by fear and power, so many lives were lost and so many people like me turned into abstract pinpoints on a global map. Thinking clearly is often linked to the muting of our emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or kept peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions.

Perhaps Mr Kissingers famous quote about the democratic process which led to the election of Allende in Chile was based largely on this belief, “"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”


Today we know that the practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, including darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. Research indicates that
an impairment in emotional capacity can actually retard our ability to make sound decisions.
Feelings are needed for making truly rational decisions.
Without emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence means little.

It's never been precisely clear what Mr Kissinger knew about efforts by the Chilean secret police to silence opponents. He has an unerring ability to dodge hard questions with lapses of recolection. It also unclear what George Bush knew and did while CIA chief in the mid-1970s, when my father Orlando Letelier and his co-worker Ronni Moffitt were assassinated in Washington by Chile's intelligence arm, DINA.

Mr Kissingger did disclose some of his feelings about my father in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And on the (Letelier case, you had known him?

HENRY KISSINGER: I knew Letelier. I liked him personally. He was a prisoner in Chile and I intervened on behalf of the Mexicans, of the Mexican government, to let him out and send, to go to Mexico. And I saw him, I think, two or three times when he was in Washington as an exile. I had personally hired a guard for him.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Were you shocked when he was killed in the streets of Washington?

HENRY KISSINGER: I think it was an outrage.

Mr Kissinger never intervened on my father’s behalf for the Mexican Government. Perhaps he did for others. It must be hard to remember. My father was released to Venezuela, not Mexico. I am sure Mr Kissinger might of seen my father on 2 or 3 occasions when we returned to DC in exile, it might have been in photos or across a crowded room. And perhaps he did hire a guard for him. My father certainly never knew about it. One week before he was killed the family had a meeting about the death threats he had received. His friends had urged him to get a guard or to get a gun.
He didnt opt for either.


Perhaps Mr Kissinger was outraged. It would be naïve to assume he was shocked over the loss of a couple of lives, after all, , while disengaging the parts in him that might of questioned the ultimate wisdom of his decisions, he had implemented policy that meant the certain death of countless nameless individuals.
I believe his outrage was over the fact that Pinochet had overstepped his arena of operation, it made for a problematic cleanup and disentanglement from the Chile situation.

Thirty years later the issues concerning his support of Pinochet and his henchmen continue. What a mess.
Yet he still manages a speaking engagement once in a while and even gets appointed to high positions.
Mr. Kissinger, and Richard Nixon lied to Congress, given misleading information and assuring the US played no role in the demise of Chile's democracy.
Mr Kissinger played a role not only in Chile but in Indochina, East Timor, Cyprus, with the Kurds in Iraq, and showed unconditional support of South Africa's Apartheid. The list goes on.

Things take time. It took lots of thinking and resources to bury the truth, to fool the public, to manage the public relations, to place the appropriate articles in the appropriate media sources. and it will take time to undo the myth and institution that is Henry Kissinger.
Oh guilt and shame they are hard opponents.
Feel Henry, feel.

I know that his friend Augusto Pinochet had feelings when he was arrested in London in 1998 for crimes against humanity, when his wife and son were dragged away on corruption charges, and when he was finally stripped of immunity and charged for ordering killings. He died knowing that his place in history would continue to be dismantled and that his name will forever be linked to human rights abuses and corruption. Things take time.
There has been considerable progress in dismantling the myth of Henry Kissinger and it will continue long after his death.

When the knock came on the door, we did not despair
we already knew
all we had was our dignity and truth
and we believed in it.
We did not despair when the lists were published
and we saw the names
When you disappeared we looked for you.
When they killed you we buried you and made promises
When we were interrogated we told them we knew the truth
When our neighbor was an FBI man we weren’t surprised
When the classified documents were published
the truth was in plain sight

transnational and global
Santiago, Managua, Saigon, Beirut,
Jerusalem, New York, Baghdad, feluja
Do not despair


Your only job is to know the truth and speak it in whatever language you can
wear it, be it, give it to as many as you can


Your only job is to know the truth and speak it in whatever language you can
wear it, be it, feel it
give it to as many as you can.

Francisco Letelier
Whittier College, Jan10, 2007

The End of the World Tin House Magazine

The End of the World
published Summer Issue 2005 Tin House Magazine

by Francisco Letelier



There are thousands of us on the street. Giant red banners unfurl in the balmy afternoon light. Freshly painted murals adorn the long blocks of our march. Chants and slogans run through the crowd; with upraised fists, with the determination only centuries of struggle and desire can ignite. Over loudspeakers come speeches and songs, muted by the incessant activity of the people, guitars and street vendors’ cries. In the stepped entrances to old buildings, candles are lit, shrines spontaneously created.


Venice, California—January 2005

I am having trouble sleeping and my dreams are full of images. I march through the streets of Santiago along with an enormous crowd towards the presidential palace, just as I did when I was fourteen years old. I wrap my poncho around me against the stiff Andean fog as I sing and shout. At my side march people I have known and loved. My grandmother, Toto, strides next to me, cursing; my father waves a flag and hugs me in a crushing embrace. I ask him where he has been. He looks so well, so alive; his red hair seems to shine. My brothers are there also, moving proudly with friends and faces from the past. There are carts and horses adorned with paper flags, the smell of cilantro and red wine. There is my mother, Isabel, in a skirt, holding a guitar. I hear her singing me to sleep. There is snow on the impossibly high mountains.
It is winter in Los Angeles. In Chile, many former generals and colonels are about to be indicted for crimes committed during the military regime of 1973-1989. A colleague, preparing an article, is asking me to help him make contact with people I know. I have urged him many times to travel to Chile, and now I feel that I must return as well, and witness the events.
My mother, now seventy-four, is waiting for me on the coast near the capital. She is in good health, vibrant and happy; she tells me to come and drink wine, eat seafood and empanadas, good Chilean bread. My brother, Juan Pablo, has written to me from Santiago, urging me to come. We can finally make good on a promise we made to each other long ago.
My sons, Matias and Salvador, do not want me to go. I have never been gone long without them. I have always tried to take them with me to Chile, so that they will also know more than Los Angeles. They will miss me. Their mothers don’t know how they will manage without me. My girlfriend reminds me I will miss her birthday. She has recently come to live with me and I am worried about leaving her alone five weeks. How can I go? Things at home are complicated enough without this sudden compulsion to leave. I tell her I do not belong to only one place, but even to me it sounds hollow, as if I am using the past as an excuse. But there is no time for more explanations; the wave of history is breaking.
In the morning she drives me to the airport. The line is long and daunting, security measures observed carefully. After two and a half hours I make it to the front of the queue, only to be told I’m too late to check in for my flight. I negotiate fiercely, and soon I am running towards my gate. As I buckle my seat belt, I remember embracing my girlfriend at the curb, the light of her green eyes as I promised I’d return as soon as I could. The country of my birth felt far away at that moment; it was hard to grasp why I was leaving, what or whom I am struggling for.

Patagonia
Since my arrival I have been meeting with human rights activists, journalists, and politicians, helping Tom Hayden shape an article for publication in the Nation. The Socialist National Convention has just ended; they have nominated Michelle Bachelet, a doctor and current Minister of Defense as the next presidential candidate. In the polls she is an overwhelming favorite. Juan Pablo has been appointed as a vice president on the executive board of the party. The previous evening he and Isabel Allende, the daughter of the former president, accompany Bachelet through the crowd of delegates attending the convention. They and others have been key figures in creating the laws and democratic institutions that will help the nation move into the future. In the warm month of February everything closes, it is the month of government recess. I join my brother, his wife Marcela and his three children at the airport in Santiago to catch a plane south.
We will travel to the city of Punta Arenas, and then after a time make our way towards Puerto Natales and a place where he has secured a cabin in the wilderness. We are finally fulfilling our promise to each other, made when we were just small children, before the storms of our adolescence. It began as a promise to visit the penguin colonies outside of Punta Arenas someday. We had played soccer as children in the Washington DC area on a team made up of other Chileans, called “Los Pinguinos Chilenos” (Chilean Penguins). The promise has grown, over the years we have acquired more reasons to travel to these territories.
We are leaving the capital amidst measures of long overdue justice. The aged former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, has been stripped of immunity from prosecution for the crimes of his regime. His right hand man, Manuel Contreras, the former head of the secret police, has once again been arrested for his role in ordering killings.
Contreras has already served soft time for ordering the brutal 1976 car bombing of my father and his American co-worker, Ronnie Karpen Moffitt, in Washington, D.C. I was seventeen; Juan Pablo was sixteen. We were pulled out of our high school in Bethesda, Maryland, and driven to George Washington hospital. On the way, we passed Sheriden Circle on Embassy row, where the blast occurred.
When we were younger, we had played in the circle, around the statue at its center. Now firemen and rescue squad personnel were hosing down the street and statue. A bloody stream of water was running into the gutter. It would flow into the C&O canal, then the Potomac River, mix into Chesapeake Bay, and then flow out into the Atlantic and beyond. To this day, I imagine the blood sinking into the salt and water of the sea and making its way around the southern tip of South America, passing through the Magellan Strait, joining with Pacific waters, and unerringly making its way through fjords, coves, and bays toward a place on the Chilean coast, near the Mapuche Indian territories where my father spent his childhood. I remember him in this way because he passed on geography to us, tutoring us strictly and methodically, hoping we would inherit his love and passion for the New World.
The city of Punta Arenas and the island lying off its coast have shaped us from a distance. Our trip south was long overdue.
I first learned about Dawson Island after the 11th of September in 1973. I was 14, a young adolescent in Santiago, the capital of Chile, more than a thousand miles from Dawson. Military powers with help from CIA advisors and other US agencies had conspired to overthrow the socialist government of Salvador Allende. The coup that ushered in an era of death, torture and exile for Chileans was the culmination of many years of covert action and intervention. Declassified memos from that period chart the many ways in which US officials manipulated our lives. The White House and its agencies had been notified in advance of the coup and had made plans to aid the military if there were difficulties. In a revealing conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after the coup, the Secretary of State reports, “We did it, no one knows…”
We had returned to Chile after living in the United States for thirteen years. My father lost his job as an economist just days after I was born because of his support for Allende’s first bid for the presidency. He was told he would not find work in Chile. We entered our first period of exile and returned to Chile in 1970 after Allende was elected, but were immediately sent back to the States so that my father could serve the popular government.
Nearly thirty political leaders from Allende’s overthrown Popular Unity government (UP) were sent to Dawson Island, along with about two hundred prisoners taken locally. Among the prisoners was my father, Orlando Letelier, former cabinet minister and ambassador to the United States for Chile. On the day of the coup my father has received an early morning phone call from Allende, “There are reports of military garrisons on the move, the navy has deployed its ships from Valparaiso.” My father said he would leave immediately to join Allende at the presidential palace. Allende said, “No, I want my Minister of Defense at the Ministry of Defense.” One of my fathers’ bodyguards did not arrive that morning, he was told his wife was giving birth. He left in a rush as he always did and we did not get news from him for days. We watched plumes of black smoke ascend into the sky, heard jets fly by as the presidential palace, a few blocks away, was bombed. In those dark and terrifying days, life as we had known it ended, we were put under house arrest as squads of soldiers searched the house. Curfews were put into place, people went into hiding, others disappeared. We thought my father had died with Allende. Later he told us that he arrived at the Ministry only to find his way blocked by soldiers. He said, “I give the orders here.” A voice came from the inside, “Let the Minister in.” As he walked through the threshold he felt a machine gun hit him in the back making him stumble. The man with the gun was his missing bodyguard. In the days after the coup he was held in several locations, at one point he was taken out and marched out to a wall where executions were being carried out. He had heard the men taken out of cells, the protests, the volley of gunfire and the dragging of bodies. As he was marched towards what he thought would be his death, he prayed that he would not tremble, cry out or stumble. An argument occurred between two officials. He heard a rough voice say, “I am in charge,” and he was led back to his cell.

Eventually he was transferred to Dawson Island. Prisoners were subject to forced labor and military marches in formation. They were made to install posts and cables, fill trucks with quarry stones, maintain roads, excavate channels, carry loads of debris, and collect decomposing ferns from a marsh to use as landfill. I have learned more about the camp and the life prisoners led in it from survivors who knew my father than from my father himself. He was careful when he spoke about Dawson. Perhaps the experiences were difficult to relive and perhaps he was protecting us. My father was released after a year, and regained his freedom; the time there was etched onto him through the scars of skin cancer, his broken fingers and finally his dedication to restoring the nation he had promised us as children. The only artifacts he left us from those days were a coffee cup made from an old tin can, reeds, and wire, a thick Mapuche men’s poncho, and an old guitar he played while in the camp. The guitar was signed by the prisoners, the majority of whom are now old men or who died while imprisoned.
The island already had a legacy of this kind confinement. In the late 1800s, a missionary from the Salesian order of the Catholic Church interned close to one thousand Selk’nam from the territory on Dawson. Within eight years, the population was reduced to a scarce 270 natives. The majority had fallen to the common illnesses brought from Europe.
The Selk´nam people had lived in these lands for 10,000 years, they called the territory Karukinka. Karukinka was later renamed Tierra del Fuego, “Land of Fire,” by Spanish navigators. The natives would light fires, which at nighttime would be seen by sailors. Selk´nam legends say their ancestors on the island became isolated when waters rose, permanently separating them from their continental brothers. The fires seen by sailors were signals to their lost brethren.

Shortly after my father’s death, Juan Pablo had left the United States for Germany, while I went west to California. Over the years we exchanged letters and met in several places. In 1984, the military began lifting restrictions on travel. We were allowed back into Chile, and we lived together in a small apartment in Santiago. It was a dangerous time. Both of us were working against the dictatorship. Juan Pablo had become a youth leader in the Socialist Party and was being watched closely. He was imprisoned several times. I was making art about exile and disappearance, and my exhibits received bomb threats. After a year in Santiago, I contracted hepatitis after giving blood for a transfusion aimed at saving the life of my fathers’ father, also named Orlando. It did not help prolong his life, but it affected mine greatly. I lost the physical strength I needed to stay in Chile. I could not stay and become a burden to those who were struggling tremendously just to get along, day by day. After I had recovered enough to travel, I left Chile once again.
Thirty years later I find myself looking across the Strait of Magellan towards Dawson Island with my brother Juan Pablo. We are standing on a tall promontory on the end of a peninsula, at the end of the world.
It seems most of the moments Juan Pablo and I have shared since my father was murdered have been as fugitives--running away from things, running towards others, carefully hiding our identities and our appearances. Now both of us laugh as we let our hair loose, worn long since we were children: hair we hid from bayonets and soldiers, under hats and inside jackets when the military seized the school we attended after the coup, the hair that made immigration officials pick us out of passenger lists. It is a warm summer day and the wind is kind gently moving through tall green grass off the blue waters of the Magellan Strait. Below us, my brother’s family explores old fortifications remaining from the first Chilean settlement in the area. We name the glaciers and islands as our father taught us, take our bearings, mark the sun, note the kelp beds below us and collect small, flat, oval shaped, black stones made smooth by time and ocean.
In 1973, a few months after my father and other officials of the Allende government were imprisoned on Dawson Island, my mother was given an audience at the Ministry of Defense. She was requesting permission to visit my father. A clandestine report from members of the International Red Cross informed us that he was very ill. Red haired and freckled, he had developed skin cancer from the unrelenting sun, and he had lost an alarming amount of weight. He had been transferred across the water to Punta Arenas for treatment. The men in the prison on Dawson were facing death from forced labor, malnutrition, exposure to the elements and psychological and physical torture; like the Selk’nam, many things were at work that might hasten their extinction.
At the Ministry my mother spoke with a commander she had met on occasions before the coup. He received her stiffly, saying, “No, you may not travel to Punta Arenas. Your husband was very arrogant.” She asked him if arrogance was a criminal offense, if there were any charges against my father. He looked at her with disdain and responded, “You are the same as your husband.” She then threw herself to the ground; crying, on her knees, her hands at his feet, she begged him to let her travel.
When my mother finally arrived in Punta Arenas in 1974, she visited another military commander housed in a building along the Central Square. Before entering she was given a gynecological exam by a woman in uniform who claimed, “This is where communists hide razor blades.”
“The commander from Santiago has no jurisdiction,” the southern commander informed her. “I am in charge here and under no circumstances will S-26 be allowed visitors.”
The high-ranking prisoners had been stripped of their identities and were referred to only by numbers. Once again she threw herself to the floor begging for permission, until a glance down a corridor allowed her to spot my thin, ill-clothed father being led by four young soldiers pointing machine guns at his back. She ran down the corridor towards him, as the commander shouted at her to halt. She hugged my father tightly despite the prodding of loaded weapons. According to my father, her embrace was like a shot of vitamins. He realized she had disobeyed the orders of those in charge and survived.
The commander led them into a small cell where they sat on opposing small cots.
“You have fifteen minutes,” he ordered. He remained in the cell, towering over them. “Talk only about domestic issues.”
My father asked her about the press in the United States, about what was being reported in the rest of the world. The commander protested. My mother replied, “We have never spoken only about domestic issues. How can we do it at a moment like this?” She quickly gave my father a response before the commander cut the visit short. “It’s only been five minutes,” she said.
“The clock started when you entered the building,” he replied.
“Try to come tomorrow,” my father whispered.
The next day my mother went to Sunday mass. On that morning she wore a gift my father had sent her through the International Red Cross: a necklace made with a flat black volcanic stone carved with the image of a seagull. On the way up the aisle she received many curious looks and stares. After mass, on the outside steps, she spotted the commander from Punta Arenas. He was in dress uniform, accompanied by his finely clothed wife. He gestured at my mother, which she understood to discourage her from making public contact.
My mother stepped up to him nonetheless, and he was obligated to greet her politely and introduce her to his wife. The commander’s wife asked if Isabel was from Punta Arenas.
“No,” my mother replied. “I live in Santiago. I am here to visit my husband who is imprisoned on Dawson. Yesterday I saw him for only five minutes and I am hoping that your husband will allow me a visit today.”
The wife was clearly ill at ease, looking towards her husband for a way out of the awkward moment. To break the impasse, the commander said, “Of course we will make arrangements for another visit, Mrs. Letelier.”
As my mother passed through the crowd, many churchgoers now reached out to her, patting her arm, whispering to her that they admired her bravery, murmuring encouragement, admiring the carved black stone of her necklace. My mother knew that, while hauling heavy loads on Dawson, the prisoners would pick up stones from the coastline and later carve them using sharpened nails. She did not know that the stones had recently been outlawed in Punta Arenas, the prisoners’ old nails confiscated. The carved stones had become a symbol of cultural resistance and, according to the authorities, of subversion. My mother’s stone was resplendent, set in an intricate gold and bronze setting and hung from an ornate chain. For the people on the street and in the church, this was a bold act of resistance and beauty.

Juan Pablo is a three-term Socialist congressman from Rengo, a district south of Santiago. His beard and shoulder-length hair make him recognizable. His outspoken and relentless work creating laws to insure human rights, social justice, and environmental sanity have made him an icon and gained him respect throughout our country. Now, as he and I walk the streets of Punta Arenas, in the far Magallanes region of Patagonia, people stop to shake hands and invite us into shops and restaurants.
Present-day Punta Arenas is far more diverse than it once was. On one corner stands a tall teenage girl, dressed in Gothic fashion, her face powdered white and long black gown slashed and safety-pinned. As we pass, her native features flash a look of recognition as she takes in my brother’s children: long-haired Jose Miguel, fifteen; Margarita, thirteen; and fashionable twenty-two-year-old Macarena, with piercings through her eyebrows, tongue, and navel, her skin flashing a tattoo. “Yes, we are real,” I think to myself, “you and us, returning from a silenced past, we are the children, we are the blood, we belong as much as anyone else.”
That night in my hotel room, the wind whistles through the walls. I hear the music from a bar below me, people getting drunk, I hear bottles break and bursts of laughter. Couples emerge into the dark street, and I wonder why my girlfriend has not answered my recent e-mails; in Santiago she had not returned my phone calls. I think about my girlfriend sleeping in our bed. I imagine slipping in with her, blowing into the room like the wind, reassuring her that I’ll be home soon. I conjure up the faces of my boys, hear their voices, and whisper I love you, letting the stars take it to them far away. They are habits from a life of exile. This is what my father said he did when he was on Dawson. He said it was one of the things that kept him alive.

The next day we leave the city and undertake a long drive towards the Torres del Paine National Park. Along the way we stopped at a small house with a zinc roof where a handwritten sign advertised meals and refreshments. Upon entering we’re buffeted with the strong smell of a curanto de olla, shellfish, mutton, and chicken steamed in a large pot. Around small tables men were drinking the local beer. They were shepherds of the pampas, and through the back of the house we see the horses they’ve ridden here.
Smelling of livestock and sweat, the men greet us warmly. They welcome my brother, a person they have only seen in newspapers and on television, to sit with them for a time, asking questions and drinking beer. They seem to have been waiting to tell their stories from the dark years of the dictatorship; they show us scars, talk about the land, and ask about the news from Santiago. My brother is not what they expected--he knows about livestock, he knows the history of the place. They like me when I eat and drink my fill.
I go outside to see their horses, compact and sturdy Chilean horses with long manes and tails, outfitted with comfortable saddles and padded with sheepskins. They offer to let me ride a young stallion. I handle him fairly and canter off into the plains, nothing in my field of view but snow-capped mountains and sheep. (I remember my son Matias, his best memories of Chile are of horses and mountains, just as mine when I was thirteen. I feel guilty he is not there with me.) When I return the men are pleased with themselves and with me. To let a stranger ride your best horse anywhere in Chile is unlikely, but especially out here. The owner, a man who looks older than I am but is probably ten years younger, jokes, “Llevate mi mujer, pero no me toquis el caballo.” (“Take my wife but don’t touch my horse.”) I tell them I bought my first pony for twenty-five dollars at an auction in Virginia, a place in the United States, with earnings from bailing hay for a farmer when I was thirteen. They laugh and shake their heads as if I was from another world, slap me on the back, and then invite me in for el trago del estribo, the stirrup drink, one last beer for the road.
Two hours later we finally reach Torres del Paine. It is an unforgettable place, teeming with wildlife; the landscape punctuated by stone needles and glaciated peaks. Herds of wild guanaco crowd its hills, condors and eagles dot the sky. Ñandu, Patagonian ostriches, are plentiful, as are foxes and pumas.
During the day we explore the park. We visit glaciers and lenga forests. The trees grow close together, their red trunks rising 150 feet, intertwining their moss covered canopies as protection from the wind, some are more than 600 years old. A small military detachment of enlisted men are assigned to patrol the park, and I see them run by our small cabin every day. We watch for huemul, the elusive and threatened Chilean deer that’s part of the national emblem. After days of hikes and searching we finally spot a well-antlered buck.
Under the Southern Cross constellation, in nights lit only by candles and brilliant stars, my brother and I bring up names from the past, reconstruct memories, talk about our children, and what the future may bring. For both of us, this place is far away from home, but we feel as if it belongs to us, that we have always planned to come here, in this way, with the warm southern wind blowing under the stars.
I hike up into thick ravines alone, knowing that perhaps I might be the first person to have done so; the park is new and some of it is virtually unexplored and untouched. But something has been hunting here for a long time: I come across a bevy of guanaco skulls against a cliff.
As I climb further, a shadow crosses my path. An eagle is floating in the wind, just beyond my arms’ reach, looking intently down at me. It rides the current, staying right above me for a minute or so, rotating its neck right and left, looking at me with one eye and then the other. With an almost imperceptible flick of a tail feather, it catches the updraft over the cliffs. When I reach the top of the ravine, I hear a cry as the eagle circles back around for one last look.
That evening we roast mutton over slow coals outside our cabin. Our meal will take some time to be ready. In the lingering and rosy light of the austral summer night I decide to walk to the banks of the nearby lake. In previous days I have spotted tracks, and seen evidence of kills by a large animal.
I break through the trees and begin to cross a small creek. Five yards in front of me, crouching on the path, camouflaged perfectly by the tall golden grass, a female puma twitches her tail. In the distance, I see one of the enlisted men. As he nears us, the cat crouches down and gets ready to pounce. I almost call out to warn him, but by then he has gone.
The cat looks up at me. For one moment I am afraid. She is perhaps the most beautiful animal I have ever seen in the wild, and somehow I know she will do me no harm. She looks at me with great curiosity and I breathe slowly, trying to make the moment last. I think of predators and prey, of prisoners and stones. Later that evening, I find a primitive hand-ax made of stone. It may be Selk’nam, immeasurably old. Its edges are still sharp.

Our trip ends and we return to Santiago.
A U.S. congressional committee, working under Homeland Security measures, has found secret bank accounts held by Pinochet at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. Juan Pablo is appointed to the Chilean congressional committee overseeing the Chilean government investigation into the accounts. The bank is only a few blocks from where our father was murdered. Both Juan Pablo and I opened our first savings accounts there. Later that week Gladys Marin, the head of the communist party, dies from a brain tumor. On my last day in Santiago, I walk the streets with my mother and thousands of others, celebrating the life and legacy of a woman who is an icon of the left and a hero for Chileans across political divisions. There has not been an outpouring of people on the streets like this since the days before the coup. On September 4th, 1973, I marched through these same streets in support of the Popular Unity government, a week later Salvador Allende was dead and the world had changed. Although we have marched through the streets many times protesting the dictatorship and later celebrating the end of the regime, today is different. We have taken this long to recover, to awaken from the effects of repression. There are people of many ages, but the crowd is mostly young. They have revived the music that was outlawed three decades ago and is retro now. The youth wear red and are adorned with tattoos and body jewelry. There are hundreds of different t-shirts with the image of Che. My mother and I lose ourselves in the procession as it makes its way to the cemetery, singing the old songs of Victor Jara, Quilapayun, and Violeta Parra.
“El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido.” The people united will never be defeated.
“Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.” Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
We chant until are we hoarse. Compañera, Gladys Marin. Presente! Compañero, Salvador Allende. Presente! Compañero, Orlando Letelier. Presente! Ahora y siempre! We know all the words.

In Los Angeles it has been raining hard. My studio in Venice is flooded. My girlfriend has moved out; I don’t know where she is. I will find her and again explain the thirty-year wind that brings me back to the center of the nation I still live in, a place that knows nothing about territorial boundaries and scoffs at distances. When I travel to Chile, a type of amnesia comes over me. I partially forget where I have come from. I submit myself to it so that I might reach parts of myself, which are distant, but still full of power.
Back in Venice, I undergo a cultural disassociation with the place I inhabit physically. From past experience, I know that the shock of returning to my life in Los Angeles will gradually pass. In the south, I have reclaimed traces left by ancestors in rock scree, barren islands, and on city streets. I have touched old-growth lenga trees and left footprints in remote places for my children and others to discover in the future. In my dreams, I am a puma on the hunt; I recognize something in a man, who, hungry and unafraid, breaks through an opening in the brush at the end of the world.

Francisco Letelier