EXILED SON OF SANTIAGO
By Tom Hayden
Everywhere begin the remembering.
- from a mural by Francisco Letelier, Venice, California.
At a backyard party in the counter-culture community of Venice, California, a few years ago I met a young artist named Francisco Letelier. His looks were striking: the long black hair of a warrior or musician, a classic Roman face, the muscular physique of a bodybuilder. The yard was full of sculptures and paintings that conveyed an overall sense of tormented hope. His name, however, is what drew me to the event. Francisco - whose friends called him Pancho - was the son of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean diplomat murdered in Washington DC with his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, by agents of the Pinochet regime in 1976.
Like millions of other multicultural Americans, Francisco is an invisible exile, made to blend into a country that is not only responsible for the dictatorship that killed his father but is famous for forgetting the uncomfortable past. Francisco is one of an estimated one million Chileans who left their country during the Pinochet era, one-tenth of the population at the time. He has joined what some call the harvest of empire or the fruits of war, rapidly changing the complexion and future of America. Trapped between memory and amnesia, between psychic integration and splitting of the self, will exiles like Francisco be assimilated into the superpower ethos that separates so many Americans from the world, or will they become a bi-national generation that employs its liberties here to expose the crimes that forced their exile? Will America become more progressive as a result of their odyssey, or will conservatives such as Samuel Huntington, like President Woodrow Wilson in yesteryear, succeed in branding them as unreliable hyphenated Americans?
The lives of then 14-year old Francisco, his mother, and his three teen-age brothers were ruptured when Pinochet agents (two anti-Castro Cuban directed by a Chilean secret police operative) detonated a huge explosive taped to the underside of Orlando Letelier's car, blowing their father in half and slicing the carotid arteries of Ronni Moffitt. Despite those who would counsel to forget the past, the traumas live on, terrorists harbored in the psyche. In addition, the case against Pinochet is still alive, and tens of thousands of newly-declassified documents continue to expose dark corners. In Washington at the Justice Department, the Letelier-Moffit case is still open against Pinochet and his Operation Condor, the undercover torture units coordinated among Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay in the Seventies and Eighties. Keeping the case open though dormant allows US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to refuse release of hundreds more documents that might clarify what the US government knew about the Condor killings during a time when the senior George Bush was CIA director. Gonzales of course was the author of the current Bush Administration's liberalized guidelines for torture and rendering prisoners to other countries for abuse or even execution, similar to the Condor operations.
Thus refusing to move on by forgetting one's father's assassination is a personal contribution to a collective refusal to forget the American role in torture. The US tried to deny or distance itself from the Condor programs, although memos released 25 years later have strongly suggested CIA involvement. If Attorney General Gonzales or John Negroponte are squirming today over revelations about torture at Abu Ghraeb, it is partly because they know that that Abu Ghraeb is not an isolated case of sado-masochism but part of a concealed pattern that goes back to Latin America and before that, the South Vietnam's "Operation Phoenix". The documents still suppressed in the Letelier-Moffitt case could be a vital chapter in the Chilean equivalent of the "Pentagon Papers". The record already shows that the CIA, under director Bush, knew as early as 1974 that the Chileans were assassinating political opponents and, when Orlando Letelier was murdered, Bush authorized CIA leaks to the media blaming the killing on other leftists. The current President Bush is unlikely to permit the release of documents which could incriminate his own father in murder or attempted cover-up of murder.
But sometimes, if only for a moment, the arc of history comes full circle. I sat one night recently in Santiago with Orlando Letelier_s widow Isabel, Francisco, and his brother Juan Pablo, now a Chilean Congressman and leader in his father's Socialist Party. We want Pinochet to play the piano, Juan Pablo smiled, tapping the tablecloth, which meant the family wants the dictator finger-printed as both a "dictator and a thief", a crucial step in confirming the record for future generations. The historic irony is that Juan Pablo himself oversees the new investigation of Pinochet's millions secretly-deposited with the Washington DC-based Riggs Bank. A dictatorship that justified itself as holy warriors against communism is being exposed as a corrupt power clique which enriched itself on military contracts and the forced privatization of Chile's economy under the tutelage of Milton Friedman. Pinochet and his cronies are trapped by money laundering provisions inserted in the USA Patriot Act by Democrats like Paul Sarbane and Carl Levin which require enhanced due diligence for public figures and criminalize hiding stolen money in American bank accounts.
What must it feel like for the murder of one_s father to be unresolved publicly and privately thirty years later, to be the same age 44 as your father was on the day of his death?. Monica Gonzales, a journalist I recently met in Santiago, said it is "finally time to talk about the peoplewho are alive, the living dead who never recovered from torture but who walkthe street, and the children of those numbed survivors." With a handful of others including Americans like John Dinges, Gonzales unearths the stories of what the Pinochet regime believed it had buried. When we get together, we talk about when the barrier between sanity and insanity crumbles, how one can kill and then buy toys for your children (as did Michael Townsley, who made and planted the bomb under Orlando Letelier_s car). She says "we have come to feel that the killing starts when someone has been conditioned to believe it's-me-or-him, that the enemy is a lethal enemy."
When I brought Francisco along to her cluttered journalist_s office, it was the first time they had ever seen each other, though their was an intimacy that crossed space and time. Monica had interviewed Francisco's brother, Juan Pablo, for a Chilean magazine when he returned to Santiago in 1982, a year before Francisco. "I wanted to know what happened to the sons when they killed the father. For six hours we talked, he cried for two of them. We both cried about the silenced crying of all those years. He started talking about a day alone in Europe (in East Berlin) when he was alone and very cold, sitting on a plaza, watching happy people through the windows of restaurants. He had hit bottom."
But you know what he taught me?, she went on. I had dedicated my life to human rights, but I had forgotten what intimacy was, what the I was, how the self was suffocated in the cause. As a journalist I never spoke of myself, and still don't. When I was tortured and raped, I realize now, that they wanted to annihilate me so that I would never do investigative journalism again. Gonzales, who has two small children, realized after her
torture that "I was very profoundly a journalist", not simply an advocate.
Since his birth in 1959, Francisco_s life has been one of exile. Only three days later, his father was fired from a research position in the copper industry for having supported Salvador Allende's failed campaign for the presidency. The Letelier family retreated to Venezuela, and from there Orlando made his way to the Inter-American Development Bank and American University in Washington DC. His wife Isabel took a job teaching Spanish to FBI agents at the State Department, where one day she opened the wrong door and saw guys with Chilean accents in sweatsuits examining an outline of a human body. Since there were no guerrillas in Chile, she asked their purpose and was told, the enemy is within. It was an Agency for International Development (AID) police training program.
Orlando Letelier was an intellectual, a singer and artist and, reluctantly, a politician and diplomat. But the times were revolutionary. Maurice Zeitlin was a 29 year old Ford Foundation researcher in Chile in 1965, who with his wife Marilyn "saw it coming" during interviews with miners and peasants. A genuine, mass-based revolutionary left was growing with the organized leadership of socialists, communists, and followers of liberation theology. Allende was always the unifier, and he never wavered from the idea of a peaceful transition to socialism. Like Lula in Brazil a generation later, Allende ran four times before being elected with a 39 percent plurality in 1970, including 75 percent of the militant working class vote. Zeitlin, now a UCLA professor whose daughter happened to date Francisco in his exile years, remembers passionate arguments over Chilean coffee in the Sixties about the merits of the "peaceful road". The Chileans he knew, many of whom became national leaders later, insisted that their country was _the England of Latin America, peaceful and constitutional. They thought they were special, he recalls, even though there was the chilling example of the military coup in Greece, another claimant to the democratic legacy. The deposed Greek leader Andreas Papandreou, the equivalent of Allende, wrote in his memoir that he understood the possibility of a coup intellectually but not emotionally, says Zeitlin. "There were no safe houses, no contingencies to protect the leaders in Greece, and it was the same in Chile." (Maurice left unspoken any speculation about whether American democracy is only as safe as its ruling class is comfortable.)
Orlando Letelier, a committed member of Allende_s Popular Unity coalition, flew from Washington to Santiago after Allende_s 1970 election to offer his services. He had unique leadership qualities, among them a sophisticated grasp of the complexities of American politics was rare among Latin American revolutionaries. Allende sent Letelier back to Washington as Chile's new ambassador, where Isabel and the boys (Christian, now 47, Jose, 46, Francisco, 45, and Juan Pablo, 44) adjusted to embassy life. According to Francisco, Orlando stressed that it doesn't matter who your father is, that they were to serve the people. The boys began hanging out on Sheridan Circle, next to the ambassador's residence, at the curbside where Orlando would be killed six years later. They opened their first teen-age bank accounts at Riggs Bank.
While President Nixon and his national security advisor, formally received Ambassador Letelier decorously, private White House documents revealed that Nixon wanted to "smash that son of a bitch Allende", by a coup if possible, by "making the economy scream", or both.
When the US-manipulated crisis in Chile intensified, Orlando was called back in 1973 to Santiago to serve briefly as the beleaguered Allende's minister of foreign relations, then defense, where he was superior to Gen. Augusto Pincohet, head of the army. The young Francisco was just finishing eighth grade. He vividly remembers General Pinochet, standing in "my father's study, the Andes visible in the windows behind him. I remember that he looked strangely disconcerted."
The International Telephone and Telegraph company (ITT) plotted with the CIA and White House to foment a coup. The US poured millions into El Mercurio, a savagely anti Allende newpaper. Weapons and money were passed to plotters who assassinated General Rene Schneider, a constitutionalist who pledged to defend the elected government. When the tanks, troops and bombs were unleashed against Allende_s offices on September 11, 1973, the US government was at least benignly aware. One official of the U.S. Military Group in Chile called it "our D-Day" and Chile's "day of destiny".
Orlando Letelier was arrested at the defense ministry and deported to Dawson Island, a frozen enclave hundreds of miles off the southern Chilean coast. Francisco and his brothers kept having "adolescent nightmares of our father in jail" while their mother Isabel made daily rounds to ministries to advocate for her husband.
Francisco was living in the shadow of Huelen Hill, where the city of Santiago was founded. Eight times the Mapuche Indians destroyed the Spanish foothold at the site, and though never conquered, were driven back across the Bio-bio river. Francisco would climb the hill and imagine the Machupe warriors, and the mixed-blood Chileans who came after them. Orlando and Isabel once sat near that hill and imagined having their children. After the coup Francisco continued to wander the old fortifications and try to
"imagine my nation." Years later he wrote a poetic vision of a new gathering on Huelen Hill, a reverse colonization in which all the far-flung exiles of the Americas would come home to
"Take the streets
Help the lost children
Hidden on corners
Hold the children
Make the world
Everywhere begin the remembering
Of places we will make our monuments."
It would be a year before the Letelier boys saw their father again. "It was a little easier because we were still discovering the world for ourselves than for our mothers whose worlds had been turned upside down", he reflects now. Francisco saw bodies floating in Santiago's river, watched the military take over his school, became so disoriented that he flunked English. He stopped going to school but didnt tell his mother. "For her, it was at least the kids are going to school", so I would stay home when she was out or go over to my grandmother's. Then Francisco was sent to an international school, where he remembers being invited over and questioned at the home of schoolmates whose parents were CIA agents. After one year of this surreal existence, vigorous Venezuelan diplomacy resulted in the sudden release of Orlando from Dawson Island, on the condition that he immediately leave Chile. The family soon began resettling in Caracas, then Orlando headed for Washington, at the instigation of an American writer, Saul Landau, where he became the leading voice of the Chilean resistance. In 1975 Orlando took a position with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), where Landau worked at the time, and plunged into writing, speaking and lobbying the U.S. Congress and European governments against the Pinochet regime.
On June 8, 1976, Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago. According to a document declassified in 1998, Kissinger told the general that we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. I think that the previous government was headed toward Communism. We wish your government well. Kissinger gingerly expressed hope that Pinochet would take cosmetic steps to deflect Congressional pressures over human rights violations, while assuring the dictator that "my evaluation is that you are victim of all left-wing groups around the world."
Presumably Pinochet already had decided to assassinate Orlando Letelier. Documents released thus far show that Manuel Contreras, the head of Chile's secret police, gave orders to organize the assassination. Over tea in the presidential palace, the dictator probed Kissinger twice about Letelier, complaining that the Chilean was providing _false information to the U.S. Congress. Kissinger did not respond specifically, but did say that we are not out to weaken your position and that you did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende, an action that was accompanied by some 4,000 deaths and disappearances.
In my opinion, Kissinger at least unwittingly gave Pinochet the green light to kill Orlando Letelier, says Saul Landau, now a professor in Los Angeles.
Just three months later, on September 18, the Chilean agent Michael Townley constructed and planted a plastic explosive on the underside of the car in the Letelier driveway in Bethesda. Francisco was sleeping a few feet away. Everyone in my family used the car. I had driven it to my school prom. On Sept. 21, any one of us could have turned the key.
Landau's wife Rebecca, who worked on human rights issues for several Congressmen, was among the first to witness the wreckage as she drove to work. She called me and said she's just witnessed the most horrible accident in her life, pieces of clothes, blood, car parts everywhere in the street. A minute later we learned it was Orlando. There was hysteria at the IPS. Landau was left in charge while IPS founders Marcus Raskin and the late Richard Barnet went to the hospital with Isabel. There they learned that Ronni had died as well. Landau, then forty years old, had no idea what to do, so I said Lock the doors. The FBI, which at the time was being sued for harassment and surveillance of the IPS, soon descended with dogs. When they asked who was responsible and were told "DINA", they responded, Could you spell that name? Landau remembers seeing Francisco and one of his brothers that day, "glazed teenagers, no idea what had happened, so incredibly traumatized, between grief and incomprehension." The boys were between 13 and 17 years old.
Landau told Raskin and Barnet to call a news conference to announce that Isabel would take Orlando_s place. They agreed. She would remain at IPS working on the Letelier-Moffitt case and human rights issues until the early Nineties when she returned to Santiago. The press conference "frankly, was bravado", Raskin recalls today, "but it set a direction. We held Pinochet and DINA responsible, that we would find a way to bring them to justice in ways conforming to legal standards." It was a moment of courage for the IPS leaders. Like Landau, Raskin recalls that the "chaos caused at the Institute
was quite grave." Some staffers associated with the civil rights movement "walked in and said I didn't sign up for no death trip", according to Landau. Paranoid that the FBI was planting evidence, or that new bombs were being secreted in their office, the Institute drifted into a debilitating split.
How does a mother of four sons heal her family when the father is mutilated in broad daylight? Isabel told me that her philosophy of parenting was threefold: first, to have "cool hands" to relieve fevers and make nightmares go away; second, a "burning heart" to love one's children "no matter what because they are immigrants who come to your heart; and third, "open arms to release them." She soldiered on, pursuing Pinochet and Condor, raising her sons admirably by all accounts, even publicly forgiving one of the junta's plotters of Orlando_s assassination, Fernando Larios (at the time, Marcus Raskin said to me, I knew you were a Buddhist). Francisco thinks that thirty years of action "has made forgiveness more possible."
After his father's murder Francisco began painting murals with the Orlando Letelier Muralist Brigade with solidarity committees around the US. The following year he enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts, then at the University of California, Berkeley, in ethnic studies. He did silkscreening at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, traveled as a muralist to Nicaragua in 1980. Finally he returned to Chile in 1983, living with his brother Juan Pablo, who had finished graduate work in Mexico. They participated in clandestine street art and demonstrations which were repressed by the police. An exhibit of his artistic work on the disappeared and the issues of exile at the French Institute was threatened and shut down. Then he became very sick with hepatitis, and decided to return to the US for graduate school.
The years 1985-1988 found him in the fine arts program at UCLA, returning to Managua with muralists, doing the art for Jackson Browne's "Worlds In Motion" album, working with incarcerated youth in LA County. Then his exile's inner life took a strange turn. He married and had a son with a woman whose background shadowed his own. Monica Mercedes Perez Jimenez was the beautiful daughter of Marita Lorenz, a former lover of Fidel Castro and a CIA agent. Several years after the early 60s affair with Fidel ended, the Agency sent Marita back to Havana to seduce Fidel and, in the process, murder him. Fidel gladly met his old flame, looked directly at her and said, "so they've sent you here to kill me." This line apparently reignited Marita's passion and terminated the assassination plot. That was the mother's side of Marita's world. Her father? The dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Perez Jimenez. Whatever was pulling Francisco, whose father was killed by anti-Castro Cubans under Chilean direction, toward this daughter of a dictator_s CIA wife with a love/hate relationship with Fidel Castro, it finally waned. But not before the couple transcended their demons to birth a child, Matias Orlando, in 1991, on the very same day Francisco was inaugurating a mural coincidentally called "Inheritance" with incarcerated gang members in LA County.
In the following decade, Francisco continued with murals ranging from a 1997 showing in Santiago's contemporary art museum to a giant "ring of peace" mural done with artists from Belfast_s divided East and West neighborhoods. Two attempts to move back to Chile were bogged down by unresolved custody issues over Matias. In 1997 he became a permanent resident of Venice, working on murals and beginning to write articles for the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere after Pinochet_s arrest in London in 1998. His American roots were deepened by the birth of a second son, Salvador Nahuel, with Kayren Pace in Santa Monica. He lives today on the same property as his brother, Christian - "the most First World of my sons", says Isabel - a marine biologist with an intenational law degree, a handsome Hollywood extra and volunteer with Heal the Bay. Another brother, Jose - "a good student, very political", says Isabel - lives on remote Easter Island engaged environmental tourism. Juan Pablo, the youngest at 44, is the most political, went from street demonstrations to congressional elections in the Nineties and a leadership position in his father's Socialist Party.
Judy Baca, the famed Chicano artist and director of the SPARC in Venice, has observed the arc of Francisco_s work since the eighties. In her first memort, he was very politicized, but candidly, I thought Francisco was kind of torn. To her dismay, he then became de-politicized, more emphemeral, more spiritual, more indigenous. Perhaps he was fatigued, she feels, by the permanent need to be oppositional, to be Orlando_s son. In this period, he became a skateboarder on the Venice boardwalk, all buffed out, turning everybody's head. Sparc sponsored Francisco's mural on the bakery wall in Venice, but Baca wanted more politics, more edge. By last year, Baca noticed, Francisco had transformed to her liking again, producing his "most impressive, remarkable" pieces. For the first time Francisco chose to incorporate his father's sarape and portrait in a work which also illustrated the slanderous role of Bush as CIA director in his father's death.
Fabiola Letelier, Orlando_s sister, is lovingly seen by her nephews as the most militant member of the family. Now in her early seventies, for decades she has been a dogged human rights lawyer for her brother and other victims of Pinochet. Her erect carriage, piercing eyes and long, narrow face carry suggestions of nobility, and of what Orlando might have looked like as a grandfather. After a two-hour bus ride to the coast, I found her in a small getaway cottage near a beach which resembled Venice, California, circa the 1930s. As we strolled along the shore, her keen mind downloaded endless findings in her thirty-year campaign against Pinochet. She has been sorting the evidence, for example, that :their first idea was to kill Orlando and others with sarin gas', a chemical project pursued by Chile's army in the Seventies. I have come to ask her about exiles, her broadest passion, however. Affadavit by affadavit, she has been filing civil suits (class actions in US legal parlance) demanding that Chile offer reparations for the
"loss of identit" and "psychological rupture" inflicted by forced emigration. She hopes that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights soon will recognize exile as a human rights violation deserving compensation.
As we looked across the ocean at our feet, she says mournfully that exile violates the project of life. The Greeks and Romans said it was worth than death.
Two days later, back in Venice beach, alongside the same Pacific currents, I stopped for a closer look at Francisco's mural. It features a tall, beautiful goddess of the sea whose umbilical chord circles the earth. The mural is beginning to decay, however, because the building is slated for removal as part of Venice's ongoing gentrification. The city may not preserve the mural for another reason, since Francisco's work is associated with the local neighborhood council which, according to an internal City Hall memo, has gone rouge. I have to recover the faded verses I am looking for from Francisco, who e-mails them from Santiago where he has finished climbing a wilderness peak at Punto Arenas with his brother Juan Pablo. The poem is called "Santiago Son, Becoming the Circle."
Look at us
So fine and wild.
Rare and undiscovered tribe,
Later on they'll talk about the way we moved,
They will.
And we will be examples of a way
So others may create a safe place within the heart
We leave behind.
Let us make a place
Where children become the mystic travelers.
TOM HAYDEN visited Chile in February. |
Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
