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A Meditation on Reconciliation, From Chile to South Africa & Beyond

When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in 1962, I was twenty years old and an itty bit of a firebrand myself, really of the minor variety, taking time off from my studies at the University of Chile in Santiago to fight the police in the streets and help organize slum dwellers in the shantytowns of my impoverished nation. South Africa was in our same Southern Hemisphere and already the symbol of the most unjust and inhumane system in the world. But its struggle was a mere glimmer, resplendent yet distant, on the consciousness of a generation whose heroes were Che Guevara and, closer by, Salvador Allende, who was to become the first socialist elected by democratic means to the presidency of Chile in 1970. Even during the three years of Allende’s peaceful revolution, whose ideals could have been modeled on the Freedom Charter of the African National Congress—even during those thousand days when we did our best to create a country in which no child was hungry and no peasant was landless and no foreign corporations owned our soil and our souls—even then, I can’t recall that we specifically protested Mandela’s captivity, except as part of a general repudiation of apartheid.

It was only after Salvador Allende died in a military coup in 1973, only after I went into exile, when I started to wander this earth, that the name of Mandela gradually became a primary beacon of hope, a sort of home to me, now that I was homeless. By the 1970s, of course, he had already solidified into a symbol of how our spirit cannot be broken by brutality, but his significance to me also grew out of the collusion of the twin twisted governments that misruled our respective peoples. The apartheid government that imprisoned him and his fellow patriots and denied them and millions of South Africans their basic rights turned out to be one of the scant allies of the South American dictatorship that banished me and was ravaging my land. B. J. Vorster and P. W. Botha were the pals of our generalissimo, Augusto Pinochet—they exchanged medals and ambassadors and pariah state visits, they sent each other admiring gifts, they shared weapons and intelligence and even tear-gas canisters. I could continue with many unfortunate and shameful examples, but one intersection of South African terror and Chilean terror should suffice: in 1976, the year of the Soweto massacre, as we were suffering a slow massacre of our own, the Chilean junta and Pinochet were making infamous around the world the system of disappearing people, arresting them, and then denying their bodies to desperate relatives. Both dictatorships sought to create through violence a world in which no rebel would dare to step into visibility, would dare to rise up. So my increasing reverence for Mandela in the 1970s and 1980s cannot be separated from the fact that his people and my people, the people of South Africa and the people of Chile, were bent on a parallel quest for justice against a brotherhood of enemies who wanted to disappear us from the face of the earth, as if our very memory had never existed. 

Even so, it was not until Chile regained its democracy in 1990 and Mandela was released that very same year, it was not until both his country and mine and indeed the world began to wrestle with the dilemmas of how you confront the terrors of the past without becoming a hostage to the hatred engendered by that past, it was not until both South Africa and Chile were forced to ask themselves the same burning questions about remembrance and dialogue in our similar transitions to democracy—it was only then that Madiba became more than a legend to me and, with his wisdom and pragmatic compassion, grew into a guide for contemporary humanity. Those of us who had struggled against injustice were to learn that it is often more difficult to listen to your enemies and forgive them than it is to suffer their atrocities, to learn that it may be morally more complicated to navigate the temptations and nuances of freedom than to keep your head high and your heart beating strong in the midst of an oppression that marks clearly and unambiguously the line between right and wrong.

Let me start with a story, one that complements and complicates the story of redemption that Nelson Mandela continues to embody. That is what writers do: plunge into the vast complexity of our human condition rather than be content with simple answers that leave us satisfied and comfortable.

A few years back, while giving away books to schoolchildren in a Chilean shantytown, as part of a literacy program that a nongovernmental organization had been running, I was approached by an old carpenter. “If it’s true that you worked by the side of Salvador Allende,” he said, “I have a story to tell you.” Carlos—that was his name, if I’m not mistaken—had been an enthusiastic supporter of Salvador Allende’s government. Allende had created a program that helped Carlos to purchase his first and only house, Allende had understood why children—including the children of Carlos—should have free milk and lunch at school, Allende had filled that carpenter with hope that workers need not be forever dispossessed of a future and that this could be done respecting the freedom of all. Following the military takeover of September 11, 1973, that left Allende buried in an unmarked grave and his image forbidden, soldiers raided the carpenter’s neighborhood, breaking down doors, beating, arresting, and shooting residents. Terror stricken, Carlos had hidden away behind the boards of one of the walls of his house a picture of the martyred president, where it remained all through the seventeen years of the dictatorship. He did not extract it, Carlos informed me, even when democracy returned to Chile and Pinochet had to relinquish his stranglehold over the government. Pinochet might not be the country’s strongman anymore, but he still malingered on as commander in chief of the army, and his disciples still controlled large enclaves in the judiciary and the media, and, above all, among those who had prospered obscenely during Pinochet’s neoliberal regime.