Another Long Walk Through the Desert to the Mountains

On September 11, 1973, the first democratically elected Marxist president in the world, Salvador Allende, was killed. Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-supported coup ushered in one of the most violently repressive regimes the world has ever shuddered to see (so it mostly shut its eyes. For this, we will pay a price, I think, as we will pay a price for Darfur, and Rwanda, for Bosnia, for Auschwitz).

When I worked at the Latin American Centre in Cambridge in the early 1980s, I often met Chilean refugees. They were respectful, intelligent, torn apart by what was happening at home. Mostly they didn’t talk about it. There was an international network of people who worked hard to find them somewhere to land, to have a safe place, maybe even to find meaningful work (difficult, though, in Thatcher’s Britain). They made empanadas to bring to potlucks. A pocket of potatoes, a pocket of Andes. Who knows what they had escaped; who knows what they lost, away from home. Not even they will ever know, probably.

Various attempts have been made to bring Pinochet to justice in the past ten years. They have all failed. Now, he’s dead.

In the vein of “L’enfer c’est les autres,” I hope the “autres” encountered by Pinochet on his final journey through the desert of black sand are those who will call him to account. Like Milosevic, he has escaped sentencing in this life…