On September 11th, 1973, a U.S.-backed coup in Chile led by General Augusto Pinochet ousted Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Allende died in the palace on that day.
Ariel Dorfman talking:
It’s very strange. It’s as if history wanted me to be in both places and to somehow bring them together, juxtapose them, and find some meaning to this. I mean, one of the meanings, of course, is that it’s very ironic that the United States should be attacked on a Tuesday, September 11th, exactly the same date when the United States fostered a coup in Chile that bombed the presidential palace on a Tuesday, from the air, and also created such havoc. It’s a very ironic sort of juxtaposition.
But I’ve gone beyond the immediate sense of United States which creates coups around the world and terror around the world and then receives terror—undeservedly, in that sense, because, you know, there’s no reasons why the United States should have these horrors happen to it. But here’s the thing that I’ve gone beyond the mere juxtaposition here. Chile reacted to the terror that was inflicted upon us with nonviolent resistance. In other words, for instance, give you an example, we did not go and bomb Washington because Washington had ordered and helped to create the coup in Chile. On the contrary, we created a peaceful revolution against Pinochet. And if you contrast that to the United States, to what Bush did as a result of this very small band of terrorists, the results have been absolutely terrible. If this was a test—and I think great catastrophes are always tests of national values and national will—alas, the United States has failed that test terribly. If you look, I mean, at the results of September 11th, 2001, it has been just terrible what has happened.
that date of September 11th, 1973, was a date which was an infamous date, and yet nobody remembered it. Now they remember it sort of even less, because it’s been buried under the weight of September 11th in the most important country in the world.
But what happened to me that day was, I was working with Allende in La Moneda, the presidential palace. And because of some sort of, really, quirk of fate, my life was spared. I was supposed to have slept there the night before, and I should have been the one who would have told the president the coup was on and have died with him in La Moneda, and instead of which, I switched places with a compañero, with a friend of mine, who died in my place. And, I mean, I speak about this somewhat in the memoir Feeding on Dreams.
And there’s a sense in which I awoke that morning—and I woke late. I never—I sleep like three or four hours a night, five hours a night. And I woke—I had slept very deeply that night, and I woke to the sense of planes coming over my house, which is very strange. My house, where I was, in fact, sought refuge in my parents’ house, because I was being sought already by fascist bands before the coup. And I wondered what was happening. We immediately put on the radio, and we began listening to these communiqués from the military. And when they came to the name of Augusto Pinochet as the head of the coup, we realized that we were really in real trouble, because he was supposed to be the person—in fact, I had spoken to him just some days before, heard his voice, and he was supposed to be Allende’s sort of loyal supporter.
And then, a while later, we heard Allende say goodbye to us—in other words, a farewell address, which was one of the most beautiful speeches, I think, in the history of politics, in any century, in which he speaks about a day that will come when the anchas alamedas, the broad avenues, of freedom will come, and the men and women of tomorrow will walk through them. You know, I mean, I still get emotional when I hear that and think of that.
And then, a little while later still, smoke began to billow up from the center of the city, which was perhaps some 30 or 40 blocks from where we were living at that time. And I knew then that everything had changed—just like, in some sense, you know, many, many years later, 28 years later, when I saw the second plane hit the towers, because the first, when I was alerted to it, I saw the second one hit the tower. I thought, this is not going to only change the history of one country, as it did in Chile on September 11th, but it’s going to change the history of the world. It’s going to take us into a vortex of the worst sort of revenge, I thought.
And I was always hoping, you know, that the solidarity shown, that the wonders of how people came together that day, that that would in fact—that when people were risking their lives to save those of others, even of strangers, that that sense of what America really is, the America that’s been built by those people—those towers were built by people, they were served by people, by everyday people, right?—that that America would prevail. Alas, that has not been the case. In the case of Chile, it was, which we did manage to come out of that ordeal with a very, very strong struggle against the dictatorship. But we got rid of him through nonviolent means. We did not exercise the very acceptable and understandable desire to seek revenge, because anger only gives way to other—to more anger. I mean, you know, anger is good as a way—and outrage is good as a way to survive. It’s not a good way to live, in anger all the time.
I wanted to stay there in Chile forever. And I was cast into exile, and then I made, as many of us do, the best of things, as most migrants do. In other words, they make a new life for themselves. And I said, if there’s a meaning to this, to this forced exile, this forced migration, this expatriation, this loss and distance from where I wanted to be, it is to turn that pain into some sort of a knowledge, some sort of a capacity for communicating the fact that this north and this south are in constant relationship with one another. We’re connected to one another.
At this point, the United States is living a series of what used to be called “third world realities.” And at the same time, places like Chile or Brazil or Argentina are living a series of solutions to those third world realities, which in fact we might be able to export to you, instead of you exporting to us those things. I say “us” and “you,” though I’m on both sides of this divide. And I think that one of the things that exile gave me was a perspective, the idea that—of seeing many societies, many different solutions, and trying to understand the underlying brotherhood/sisterhood underneath these supposed differences. You know, the conflicts that there have been between the North and the South are just inherent in my own life.
At the same time, there is a possibility of understanding one another and cooperating. And if 9/11 had been a way of making most of the Americans understand that what happens in Tehran or happens in Mogadishu or happens, in fact, in Saudi Arabia is going to affect deeply their own lives, then perhaps it would have been—I’m not saying it’s worth it, but it would have woken the American people up to the fact that you cannot construct a new global order, a real order, a real order of solidarity, of compassion, of progress, unless you’re willing to understand that one child who dies in Minneapolis is as valuable as one child who dies in Santiago de Chile. And that makes us one humanity. I think exile helps one to understand this idea that we are one humanity, that we are responsible for one another, and that, in fact, one of the great tragedies, you know, when you speak about catastrophes and calamities and terrors, we should be really in terror of one major, major thing: we are in danger of becoming extinct if we do not tackle climate change, you know, and none of that has happened during the last 10 years. We’ve lost that possibility. Now, that’s real terror, not the terror of bin Laden, which can be very easily contained through criminal investigations, you know. The real terror is that one. And we should understand that we’re all in this together, and this planet is going to burn if we do not find a way to get together and solve this problem together. So, exile helps me in some ways, but, you know, you don’t have to be in exile to realize those things.
Discussion with Ariel Dorfman.
Ariel Dorfman, served as a cultural adviser to Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973. After the coup, Dorfman went into exile. Today he is recognized as one of Latin America’s greatest writers. His essays, novels, poems and plays have been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2004 he published a collection of essays titled Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations. His latest book is titled Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile.
– from democracynow.org
On September 11th this year, India marks the 105th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi launching the modern nonviolent resistance movement.
On September 11, 1990, renowned Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack was assassinated in Guatemala City. She had been stalked for two weeks prior to her death by a U.S.-backed military death squad. Myrna had been targeted in retaliation for her pioneering field work, which had begun to expose and document the destruction of rural indigenous communities in Guatemala. Guatemala’s U.S.-backed state forces and allied paramilitary groups were responsible for tens of thousands of human rights violations, including attacks against indigenous populations.
Then there was Steve Biko in South Africa. Steve Biko was being beaten to death in the back of a van, September 11th, 1977, by apartheid forces—unfortunately, U.S.-backed apartheid forces. He died in the early morning hours of September 12th, 1977.
And there was September 11th, 1993. In the midst of the U.S.-backed coup in Haiti, Antoine Izméry, a Haitian businessman who had thrown in his lot with Lavalas, was dragged out of a church by coup forces. He was murdered in broad daylight. He had been commemorating a massacre of parishioners at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church that had occurred five years before, on September 11th, 1988. At the time, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide narrowly escaped death in that attack. He later became president of Haiti.
Ariel Dorfman talking:
The first is that we have September 11ths happening every day, everywhere. In other words, there are constantly acts of terror against the people, against the innocent people. And we have to understand that we need to get out of the September 11th sort of syndrome. And I’m using this as a metaphor, right? It turns out that that day is very significant, because it brings together these two events in Chile and the United States, which are similar—the Tuesdays, the bombs from the air, the terror, etc. But as Aristide just pointed out and as Helen Mack pointed out and as Arun Gandhi pointed out, there are other September 11ths, as well. So that’s the first thing I would say is, let’s remember that.
A second issue has to do with the—something that comes out of Chile is—and it’s something good that comes out of the terrible tragedy we had—is that, eventually, we arrested the—in fact, the British government, at the petition of the Spanish authorities, arrested General Pinochet in London in 1998 for crimes against humanity and torture. And it set an incredible precedent, which is that former heads of state—and, in fact, heads of state—can be judged anywhere in the world where humanity exists—in other words, anywhere—for crimes against humanity. It’s not crimes against the Chilean people. When Pinochet ordered torture, he was torturing one person, he was torturing the whole world. And those crimes do not prescribe.
The reason I’m mentioning this at this moment is because a few days ago on ABC, Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff of Colin Powell, said that one of the things that Cheney, Richard Cheney, Dick Cheney, was afraid of was of being “Pinocheted” — in other words, being made Pinochet. Now, I had never heard the word “Pinochet,” which is a dread word for me, you know, a man who was responsible for so much death and suffering and destruction in my country, including my own life, I mean, which had been really exploded by him. That this man should not only become a noun, like saying, “We want a Pinochet,” which people say when they say basically they want law and order and destroying the trade unions and breaking the social security network and privatizing the social security, when they say that. But I had never heard it made into a verb, in other words, to Pinochet somebody. Now, to Pinochet somebody is not to do a coup now; to Pinochet somebody, in the case of Dick Cheney, is to be put on trial for crimes against humanity, for war crimes, which, of course, both Cheney and Bush should be. I doubt that they will be, but he certainly should worry about going to Spain or going to France or going to England, because he might end up in jail, or in the possibility that that should happen to him. So he obviously is trying to not be Pinocheted. And I like the fact that Cheney is now scared of Pinochet, of the ghost of Pinochet, having brought in a world where Pinochet would be proud and where Pinochet was very, very happy. You know, in 2001, he said, “That proves how right we were,” you know? So, that was one thing I just wanted to comment on.
And the last thing has to do with Gandhi. You know, I gave the Mandela lecture last year in South Africa and met up with the great hero and the great icon of our times, you know, Nelson Mandela. And it was wonderful to see how peaceful he was, even at 92 years old then, and how, though there was a military strategy on the part of the ANC, it was basically a nonviolent resistance which managed to topple the apartheid regime, which one never would have thought possible, and to have a transition, which was a very complicated transition, to democracy of that country. I find it very interesting to see how, in 1906, on September 11th again, there is this shining example of Gandhi, who decides to question what are pre-apartheid discriminatory practices. In other words, if you look at what was being applied to the Indian population, the migrant Indian population, right, in South Africa, it was basically a rehearsal for the apartheid regime and laws that were going to be put into place, where Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo and all the rest of the ANC were going to then confront that, in the sense of saying, the fundamental resistance—and I think Arun Gandhi says it well—but I would add to that, the fundamental resistance, the real weapon of resistance, are the bodies and the consciousness of human beings, day after day. Those are the ones. Now, you pay a big price for that. [no audio]
another September 11th. It was September 11th, 1971. We’re going to turn now to an excerpt from the film Ghosts of Attica, a Lumiere production, which was made for Court TV. The story is told by Frank “Big Black” Smith, a prisoner who played a prominent role in the rebellion, who was tortured by troops, and Liz Fink, who served as the lead counsel for the former Attica prisoners. On September 9th, 1971, Attica prisoners rose up, Attica in upstate New York. On September 13th, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called out the state troopers. They opened fire, killing 39 men.