Democracy for a Ghost Nation

Abstract

During sixteen monstrous years of dictatorship (1973-1988), 1 would travel to my native Chile. I longed to see the faces of the people, to take in the aroma of peaches and summer, to behold from the heights and the distance the implacable Andes. Touching down on the Chilean soil implied an endless number of consequences, such as possible detention by the national police due to my suspicious activities, which consisted of writing poetry against the dictatorship, poems with the voice of the disappeared, the afflicted, and also traveling to North American universities speaking of the Chilean arpilleras, political tapestries sewn from old and unwanted scraps of clothing by women relatives of the disappeared. In these tapestries, a political. history was told, a history plagued by horror, hunger, fear. In January 1992, I return to my country, even though every return means a clash, a confrontation, a second meeting with my generation, a lucid and dynamic generation, always willing to talk, open to dialogue. More than anything, we are a generation schooled in political and ideological matters. That's why we disappeared into the prisons and torture chambers and only exiguous memory managed to save us. This historic January of the year 1992 I return to Chile; the summer in the Southern Cone is luminous and diaphanous. The Andes are visible from afar and it would seem to be a blizzard of air. My country is beautiful and giving and yet it is now ours, or is it almost ours? The secret police no longer exist in the small Pudahuel Airport; happily we all enter as before, we embrace as before and the fear of the unexpected would seem an unwanted thing. But we should ask ourselves, are we as before? The Chilean military dictatorship not only murdered our youth, built gargantuan cement monuments such as the one known as the White Elephant, that is, the Chilean Congress in Valparaiso, an enormous building of immense rooms erected by Pinochet, the ex-dictator. I believe that the Chilean dictatorship managed to destroy our political life, our desire to talk about