SANTIAGO—Many years ago, in the early 1980s, Lucía Pinochet telephoned me to invite me to her office for coffee. I understood that she wanted to converse in private with the political editor of Chile’s principal opposition weekly, Hoy. To reject her invitation would have been imprudent: She was the daughter of the dictator.
As soon as the formal greeting had passed, she cut to the chase. She did so because she could. “I really regret the crime against your father, Patricia. In these situations there are always excesses which we must regret. . . .”
I remained silent, looking at her, and she repeated, “I really regret it. Really….”
There we were, face to face—the daughter of the dictator and the daughter of a slain union leader. I continued to sit there without saying a word while she ordered coffee and gave instructions to her secretary. What could I say to her? Nothing. She lived in her own courtly world, full of bows and curtsies and bodyguards, with military chaplains who raised her father up as the blessed chalice to the altar of the fatherland. My world was one of dark dissidence, of nighttime phone calls that threatened death, of the search for prisoners who never reappeared, and of far too many funerals.
I said nothing, but I believed her. And still today I believe her: She regrets the crime against my father. She believes that it was nothing more than an “excess,” that someone went overboard and killed an innocent man. Such were the occupational hazards of an intelligence agent, the hazards of the dirty war.
This may help explain her assertion in a recent interview with a Spanish newspaper that General Pinochet is “a political prisoner” in England and a victim of the “political vengeance” of the international left. When someone put the list of 3,200 victims in front of her, she said, “Of course these people were killed. The majority of them were taken with weapons in hand, fighting.”
It is time for Lucía, during the long flights between London and Santiago, to read the two volumes of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which included the participation of people from the right who she should find credible. The report decisively concluded that the victims fell at the hands of agents of the state and were cruelly assassinated without the right to defense. With weapons in hand, fighting? From where did the dictator’s daughter pull that version of the story? In fact, it is so clear what happened that right-wing members of Congress approved financial compensation for the victims’ families. Each month my mother receives a check from the state.
The dictator’s daughter cannot accept that there were secret prisons and torture chambers. She needs to imagine that her heroic agents engaged in shootouts with villainous guerrillas. What I am unclear about is how she explains the disappearance of the bodies. If they died in combat, why throw the bodies into the ocean or bury them clandestinely?
For more than 25 years, for example, the body of the great musician Jorge Peña Hen was disappeared. He was so loved in his region, La Sirena, that only he and the poet Gabriela Mistral, winner of the Nobel Prize, are now buried in public parks, although it took a quarter of a century before Peña Hen received a headstone with his name on it. Peña Hen was the director of the School of Music at the University of Chile and the founder of the Children’s Symphony Orchestra. A member of the Socialist Party, he was 45 and had a daughter named Fedora. After being detained by the military, Peña Hen was never tried by a military court during the month he was in prison: He and several other prisoners were killed by soldiers in the patio of the re-giment. They emptied dozens of bullets into each of the bodies and then stabbed them for good measure. More than 70 prisoners were killed in different cities in northern Chile in this military operation—known as the “caravan of death”—which was headed by General Sérgio Arellano and ordered by General Pinochet himself. (In late June, a valiant Chilean judge served a warrant for the arrest of Arellano and four other high-ranking military officials for their involvement in these crimes.) The bodies were so torn to pieces that the colonels decided to hide them. What explanation could possibly be given to their families? This is why the body of Jorge Peña Hen was delayed 25 years in arriving at its own funeral. His body began to emerge—bone by bone—from a communal grave this past October, just as General Pinochet was being informed of his arrest in the London clinic.
Lucía Pinochet regrets the “excesses” and maintains that there were only a few such cases. The rest, she assures us, were “combatants.” Combatants of what? She forgets that her father was made Commander-in-Chief of the Army by President Salvador Allende, who trusted him and others like him who were given responsibilities in his government. With the coup, overnight that “trust” became a passport to torture and death, as did the idea of popular sovereignty that united so many senators, deputies, town councilors and union leaders. Soon, tens of thousands of Chileans filled the military’s concentration camps.
Lucía Pinochet needs to invent a war for herself because otherwise she could never look her father in the eye. She needs to believe that he is a “political prisoner” because she cannot conceive of him as a criminal. I understand that, and I pity her. I have no need to tell myself lies when I remember my father’s honest expression. Nor does Fedora Peña need to explain herself when she sheds a few tears during the concerts that pay homage to the great maestro who was her father.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Verdugo is a Chilean writer based in Santiago. She won the Chilean National Journalism Prize in 1997, and is author of eight books, including Interferencia Secreta (Editorial Sudamericana, 1998), Los Zarpazos del Puma (Ediciones ChileAmerica, 1997), and Operación Siglo XX (Ornitorrinco, 1990). This article, which appeared in Diario 16 on May 29, 1999, is reprinted with the author’s permission.
