Chileans remembered their own September 11th last week. 40 years ago the government was overthrown and a dictatorship was installed that would last for 27 years.
It’s a divisive issue that in some ways haunts the country to this day. Some claim that liberty died that day and was never restored, some say it was necessary to restore democracy and some think the country should just move ahead and forget the past.
People sometimes ask me how I feel about it as I was born in Chile. Honestly it doesn’t make me feel anything at all. Even though I was born in Chile I was registered as an American citizen and have never been anything but an American.
My family’s involvement with the coup was that my father was an American living in Chile and running a successful business before the coup and the local socialist party lads came round and told him that they were thinking of nationalizing his business and taking everything from him. So he closed shop, left the building and equipment in the care of a partner and took his money out of the country before they could confiscate it from him.
My parents told me about the family sneaking out of the country through the desert in the middle of the night. I was just an infant at the time so I don’t know about any of this.
The coup happened, my father returned and found that his business partner had liquidated the company and taken all the money for himself. He could do nothing about it. He got jobs working for various multinationals in South America and we started our trek north through Ecuador and Colombia and we would eventually end up in Houston in ’77.
I returned to Chile a couple of times during the dictatorship years to visit relatives during the 80s. Was it an oppressive environment? Not really. I mean there was an increased police and military presence in the airports and on the streets but were people being bullied and rounded up? no.
My mother is a proud Pinochet supporter. Although on most other things she is firmly left of center she thinks the coup was a good thing. She remembers the local rationing boards that the Allende government set up, the confiscations of property,
My own view is that they have to move on with their lives. They have too many challenges ahead of them to keep living in the past. Chile could become the first Latin American country to make a leap out of the third world and into the first world. But first they have to resolve their past and put it away before they can go on into the future.
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