Chile: Pinochet and the UK’s embarrassing history of siding with despots
I first became aware of Chile was when I read Isabel Allende’s masterpiece House of Spirits and became aware of magic realism. She’s one of my all-time favourite authors and so had been looking forward to this week’s book, her historical novel about the founding of Chile Ines of my Soul. After reading so many traumatic books recently, I was glad to have found a novel that steered clear of outlining the recent horrors of Augustus Pinochet’s brutal massacres. But of course nations are rarely founded in glory and so the book was full of ancient horrors visited upon the Indigenous Mapuche people. But despite the subject matter, Allende’s turn of phrase and lack of judgement achieved the almost miraculous feat of humanising the colonisers without underplaying the suffering they brought on themselves and the Indigenous Peoples whose lives are still being affected 300 years later.
Given the bloodshed and pain of Chile’s beginnings, this week’s first film, Nobody knows I’m here, was surprisingly gently. It is the tale of a man who becomes a hermit after he is told some-one else should mime his songs as he is not handsome enough to be a singer. The film shows a peaceful Chile, full of farmers and shepherds and lush rain-filled valleys. Quite the opposite of the atacamba desert, the driest place on earth, which the colonists in Allende’s book must battle before beginning their wars.
This desert is at the foreground of our second film Nostalgia for the light a documentary which starts by describing life before Pinochet, a happy time of transistor radios and stargazing, particularly in this darkest of deserts which has the night skies that astronomers dream of. They also have the equipment of dreams, telescopes powerful enough to look back to the big bang that started this mess so long ago. But what starts out as a film about the loss of the night-sky, and the starscape that has been fundamental to every culture in history, soon starts to look at a much more specifically Chilean loss. For while astronomers are searching for the secrets in the stars, families search the sand for the remains of their loved ones killed by Pinochet’s death squads. For this desert is where the Thatcher-supported Pinochet regime set up concentration camps for political prisoners, and where they buried many of the 1000s that were killed in their rule of terror.
The more the film revealed the layers of his crimes against humanity, the more ashamed I became to be from a country that supported him. Even when the crimes were well known, and the Labour government had arrested him, Thatcher sent him a bottle of Scotch and a supportive note. There is even a song that picks away at their warped friendship Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher.
But Pinochet didn’t just love Scotch, he also had a penchant for Pisco Sour, the cocktail of Chile and maybe my favourite cocktail so far. It was so nice I ended up sampling neat Pisco and I recommend it highly. I also recommend this week’s meal Pastel de Choclo — a polenta and aubergine pie. We were meant to combine it with Completo — hotdogs stuffed with EVERYTHING. But Covid struck our children and our planned meal remains unmade.
So that just leaves music. I get the feeling that I have only scratched the surface with this week’s playlist, which focuses on Victor Jara (sadly killed by Pinochet’s regime) and the New Chilean Song movement. If you can recommend any more, please let me know, as I am preparing for perhaps the most complex country so far… China!
