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