Day 12

Today I had such a profound excursion.

Every weekday, my study abroad program CIEE instructs us students with little lecture about Chile with a professor/expert and then to a related field trip around Chile. For example, on Friday, our lecture was on Chilean Literature and Poetry, and we subsequently went to Pablo Neruda's house in Santiago--La Chascona. Today, our lecture was on Human Rights in Chile and about the systematic violation of human rights throughout Pinochet's entire military regime. We then went on a field trip to El Parque por la Paz en Villa Grimaldi and the Cementario General.

When I applied to study abroad in Chile, I noted the quietness of the country and its stability. I knew about the military coup, the death of Salvador Allende and the following dictatorship of Pinochet. What I didn't understand until I arrived in Chile was how difficult a topic Pinochet still is because of the profound changes he made in the economy (neoliberal + much more) and the democracy (he rewrote the Chilean constitution in 1980 to make it into systematic autocracy + much more). What I further did not know until I arrived in Chile were the number of people tortured and killed. I thought that "desaparecidos" (the disappeared) were only a phenomenon in Argentina. They are not.

When I saw El Parque por la Paz on my program's itinerary, I thought that it would be a quiet place like the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington. I did not anticipate to be standing on the grounds of a former torture center. I did not realize how many thousands of political prisoners were taken here. I did not know the many steps of torture. I did not prepare to be guided by someone who was tortured in the exact grounds we were stepping on; someone who knew "desaparecidos" who did not come back. I did not expect to be retaught how important treatment of human rights were.

And human rights are incredibly important. Stepping from place to place in a park that has barely any signs left of its bloodshed and brutality, I could not help thinking that something should be left behind. The torturers and the prisoners at the hundreds of torture center both suffered from being less than human. How could so many people go through a place and experience a physical and/or emotional loss of parts there without leaving something else behind? A ghost? A spirit? I really hope that some of the hidden history that occurred in Chile, history that some people buried, will come to light. Chile is still trying people for crimes committed 37 years ago to answer questions about thousands of people. Here's a wish for people can receive peace before everything, including themselves, turns to dust.