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Chilean Street Art, Valparaiso, and Back to Rochester

Political Street Art and Miscellaneous

After our street art tour in Bogotá with Camilo, I kept my eyes open for street art in other places we visited. Santiago also has a notable street art community and now I kind of wish we had taken a graffiti tour there. The first street art we saw was actually an advertisement for an Amazon Prime program! The yellow owl was across the street from a cafe where we got some lunch. In my blog post on the ESMA Museum of Memory in Buenos Aires, I talked about the meaning of “Presente.” So when I saw the graffiti about Luisa Toledo, I looked her up. The Pinochet regime killed three of her children, and she became involved with liberation struggles against the dictatorship. She also advocated for the Mapuche Indigenous people, who were seeking territorial autonomy. Her family put out the following communique when she died.

COMMUNIQUÉ (Santiago de Chile)

To the national and international community
To the women, the children, the elderly, and the honorable men of this land
To the political prisoners
To the clandestine ones who plow through rebellions
To the Mapuche people
To those who fight
To the residents of Villa Fráncia
To the combative youth:
It is with deep sadness that we inform everyone of the death of our beloved comrade Luisa Toledo Sepúlveda. Surrounded by her most intimate family circle, she passed away peacefully in the privacy of her home on the morning on Tuesday, July 6.
On this cold July morning, we were proud to be able to say goodbye to an unwavering, timeless, and essential woman. And although Luisa leaves us physically, her legacy has deeply penetrated the history of those who fight beyond the borders of this territory called Chile.
With incalculable courage, Luisa fought for a justice that she never received after the murder of her children, Eduardo, Rafael, and Pablo, a pain that made her decision to fight unbreakable.
Today will be marked as a before and after with the indelible mark of Luisa. Luisa, mother of the fighting youth, will continue to be an unfaltering beacon for those who fight.
Let it be known to all the traitors, syncophants, and those who remain comfortable during moments of revolt, that her tenacity and consistency will remain the trailheads for new paths of struggles and rebellions in every poor corner of this world.
Compañera Luisa Toledo Sepúlveda, Present
Villa Francia, July 6, 2021
#FightlikeLuisa
#MotherOfThecombatantYouth
#LuisaLives
#EveryDayAYoungCombatantisborn
#VillaFrance
#FreedomToThePrisonersoftherevolt

https://crimethinc.com/2021/07/09/remembering-luisa-toledo-sepulveda-the-mother-of-combative-youth-a-eulogy-and-report-from-chile

The graffiti “RP Global killed the black woman” probably refers to the death of Macarena Valdés, a Mapuche Indigenous woman. The Chilean authorities arrested her for trying to prevent the multinational company, RP Global, from stringing high voltage power cables through her community. The one beside it says “War to the state,” with an anarchist logo beside it. Below, we have poetry. The first, blue against a cream background, reads “Soul trash/We collect your fears/Old loves and bad luck/ Shake it off here.” Not sure of the poet’s last name, but the first is Pippi. The same poet (Pippi Morís?) wrote in white on blue, “Assembly of a whole being/I feel cold, never afraid/My soul is conscious/Vibrating along.“

Victor Jara was an internationally famous Chilean folksinger and university professor tortured and killed by Pinochet’s regime. Dragged into an indoor stadium, soldiers smashed his arms and systematically broke his fingers. Then they taunted him to play his guitar. The Spanish under his portrait reads, “With the force of song.” To his right, is a poster showing an indigenous person kicking a soldier, with the phrases, “Soldiers go back to your quarters.” On either side is the quotation, “So that memory does not exist only in September,” recalling the September 11, 1973 coup.

Below that, you’ll see a poster about Indigenous people that has been ripped off the wall. To its right, the poster says, “With death and torture, Democracy is still being built. Sowing terror to defend your interests and continuing to profit from our necessities. To 50 years of the coup. Self-organization,[obscured], and Direct Action. The encircled A and the star represent Anarchists and Communists. I don’t know what the third logo represents. It does not appear to be the flag of Chilean socialists. Because of its proximity to the Indigenous poster, and because of how governments treat Indigenous people in the Americas, I think the two posters may relate to each other. I don’t know what the three-eyed person means in the street art below that, but the words say, “State of Rebellion before the Oppressor State.”

In the last row, we see graffiti dedicated to the struggle of the Mapuche people. “Mapuche” means “people of the land” in their language, and “newen” means “force.” The small posters stuck on the painting of an arch call for justice in the murder of Annibal Villarroel, a working class protestor shot by police lieutenant Joaquin Muñoz Vasquez in 2020. Alex Nuñez was a 39-year-oold repairman who was trying to get home under military curfew. Police chased him and and beat him up. He died later in the hospital from his injuries. Under his image, someone has written, “They fell fighting for [human/civil] rights.” And below that, someone has written, “Arise those who fight (or struggle.”). The writer turned the tail of the q into a cross. On the picture to the right, the graffiti says, “For Communism, for Anarchy, let’s go on the offensive.”

Street Art features a young woman with orange hair, three green eyes, red circles on her cheeks, and a red mouth. Underneath, it says in Spanish, "State of Rebellion against the State Oppressor."

I thought a couple of pieces were so striking I wanted to feature them. First up was the adaptation of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which was his response to the 1937 bombing of the city of Guernica by fascist Italy and Germany. The artist of this mural used Picasso’s motif to describe the crackdowns on protests against inequality that began in 2019 and continued into 2020, until Covid-19 ended them. One demonstration on October 25, 2019 had more that 1 million people show up.

We stopped in at the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center , which was closed for the day, and saw this mural. I would have loved to have had a Chilean historian or art expert explain it to me. I did a Google Lens search, and someone said this mural is called “Free Africa.”

I saw a mosaic on the side of the building—obviously installed when the center was built—that I initially thought was a picture of the Catholic Church bringing enlightenment to the savages. However, on closer inspection, I see that it’s a depiction of Gabriela Mistral, who herself received little standard education because she grew up in poverty. She advocated for Indigenous, poor, and working-class children to have the same right to education as other Chileans. Below are a couple of other murals from the center. The quotation above and below the frame in the picture to the right means, roughly, “As the streets expand over everything, the countryside shrinks. If the countryside dies, the city doesn’t eat.”

International Women’s Day Street Art

The evening we landed in Santiago, our driver told us he could take us only within three blocks of our rented room because of the International Women’s Day March. Dragging our luggage all that way was not fun, but participants in the March sure left a lot of interesting graffiti and posters behind. The top photo is slang that means, roughly. “Legal Abortion. Never with the police. Always with the whores.” The three unobscured graffiti postings below it read, “No is no,” “How many have to die in the name of false love,” and “Believe your daughter.” The posters give statistics:

  • In Chile, women work double the hours of men each day to take care of children and other dependents
  • At a global level, women work more than 76% of the unremunerated jobs.
  • 1 out of 2 women of working age do not participate in the workforce, while 70% of men in the same position do.
  • Women in Chile receive $21.7 less that men do.
  • Did you know that only 7.5 public monuments are about women?
  • 9 out of 10 women have been harassed on public transport.
  • Did you know that only 5.5% of the almost 100 million streets in Chile are named after women?
  • In Latin America, 49% of women have taken a break of 6 months or more from their work.
  • In Chile, 2 out of 5 women cancel trips within the city because the situation is too insecure for them to go there.

The posters in red depict the pictures of young women that the Pinochet junta regime kidnapped and who are still missing. The poster of the little girl in her school uniform jumping the turnstile reads, “Against the disposal and the violence of the colonial, capitalist, patriarchy. We resist for life. We march for transformation.” The final picture, bottom right, says, “I am the artist. NOT the muse.”

Palestinian Solidarity Street Art

As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog postings, we saw evidence of solidarity with Palestinians in all the countries we visited. In South America, only French Guiana does not recognize the State of Palestine. In Santiago, however, support for Palestinians seemed omnipresent. I remembered a friend in Bethlehem telling me in the 1990s that there were more Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem in Santiago, Chile than there were Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem. I also remember his taxi driver friend telling me he didn’t want to emigrate, but the Israeli closure of Bethlehem had tanked the economy, and he had family in Santiago who could help him start a new life there. Nearly half a million Palestinians live in Chile today.

From the top left: I took this picture from a car, so it’s not the greatest, but you can see the Palestinian woman wearing a keffiyeh (incidentally, some Palestinian Muslim women do wear keffiyehs—usually as a political statement, but it’s unusual. They prefer more fashionable headscarves. Keffiyehs are for working-class men.) On the top right, the posters say, “Together in the Struggle,” and feature an Indigenous woman, a Black woman and a Palestinian woman. Bottom left is a stencil showing a Palestinian woman holding a baby, with the statement: “Patriarchy equals genocide.” The next poster is a lithography saying, “Free Palestine.” (Below that is a poster saying “Milk is rape.”). Hanging on the same screen are posters saying, “No+Genocide,” with abstract figures in the colors of the Palestinian flag. On the bottom right, the top slogan says, “Palestinian Woman Resist.” (Below, in red, it says “Woman, light your fire” and, in black, “To abort is a right.”)

Valparaiso
We have a friend in Rochester from Chile who encouraged us to go to Valparaiso, because she doesn’t like Santiago, and thinks Valparaiso presents a more beautiful side of Chile. Valparaiso is indeed a picturesque city. Valparaiso has Latin America’s oldest stock exchange, the continent’s first volunteer fire department, and Chile’s first public library. El Mercurio de Valparaiso is the world’s oldest Spanish language newspaper still in publication. UNESCO has called Valparaiso a World Heritage Site because of its historic importance as a seaport where ships stopped on their way to and from the Straits of Magellan before the Panama Canal was built.

Below is our lunchtime at a restaurant that our friend from Rochester recommended for the view. A driver in Santiago whom we liked agreed to take us to Valparaiso and then to the airport to catch our overnight flight. So of course, we invited him to eat with us. I ordered the dish our friend had recommended, the seafood soup. Good choice.

We took a walk into the center of the city before we went into its hills. This statue of the Greek god of justice, Themis, appealed to me. I think it was her swagger, with the hand on the hip. The plaque reads, “Themis, goddess of justice, ‘Figure and features of a young woman, a hard and fearsome look. Very vivid shine in her eyes, neither submissive or threatening, but with the dignity of a certain venerable sadness.'”

We then went up to the upper levels of Valparaiso on a funicular. The city has 17. Basically, they operate on the principle of counter weights. As one car goes down, it pulls the other one up. The pictures show the view from the top.

We thought we were seeing more Chilean street art in this hilly neighborhood, but the painter of both pictures has a Colombian Instagram address. I am not sure what the picture on the right signifies. The picture on the left shows Chile being drained of its resources. I am guessing the octopus pig is multinational corporations? Or other nations? The “Liberty of Chile” is one thing octopus pig is stealing.

Back to Reality

The flight from Santiago to Atlanta was very long, and my back was throbbing by the time we landed. You know how I complained in a previous blog post about Chile not having cheap espresso drinks? Well, a cup of IHOP coffee was a sad, sad way to end the trip.

However, we did have a lovely brief visit with Michael’s friend Maidie as we waited for our flight home in Atlanta.

As I write, we are halfway through June. I’ve been job hunting and tending the garden. When I reflect on the trip this spring, I would say my favorite part of the trip was visiting friends. I am glad that Sandra and Tuti feel safe in the countries they once fled, but I also think of all the students, intellectuals, dissidents, and ordinary people who simply wanted a better society and met terrible ends in their nations.

Learning the histories of these countries also left me with the conviction to never take democracy for granted. Some Colombians, Uruguayans, Argentinians and Chileans feel nostalgic for the times of dictatorship and political assassinations. There will always be privileged people who support governments that engage in unimaginable cruelties, as long as this tyranny results in the elites living comfortable lives, and as long as the government’s misinformation brainwashes enough people.

Those who have ears let them hear.

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Three Museums, Constitution Plaza, and Interesting Chilean Drinks

On March 9-10, we made three short to very short visits to three more museums, the Gabriela Mistral Education Museum, which we visited on the afternoon after our visit to the Memory Museum, the Pre-Columbian Art museum, and Pablo Neruda’s House.

Gabriela Mistral had an impressive career. Famous for her poetry, she became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The government also appointed her to be a diplomatic consul to 10 different cities in Europe and the Americas.

But her first career was in education. She grew up in poverty and left school at 11 to support her family by sewing and then working as a teacher’s aide when she was 15. Her teaching career attracted notice and the Ministry of Education appointed her as director to several prestigious high schools in Santiago. Later she moved to Mexico to help reform the education system there.

The museum itself was mostly about the history of education in Chile.

Shortly before the Pinochet dictatorship fell, he handed over the education system to private corporations, who continually raised fees and reduced services. In 2006, students throughout the country rebelled. Called the Penguin’s Revolt, a reference to their black and white school uniforms, students demanded that the Chilean government stop allowing corporations to make a profit from their education. The signs below (clockwise from the top left) say, “It’s going to fall; it’s going to fall, the education of Pinochet.” “Let’s go, comrades. We have to put a little more effort into it. We quickly go out onto the street. Chilean education is not sold; it is defended.” “Education is a right.” “The rebel penguin doesn’t sleep.”

That evening we went to a Chinese-Venezuelan restaurant that included ham and cheese egg rolls on the menu. I will say no more.

The next day, we went to see the National Museum of Pre-Columbian Art. At first, the plaque commemorating the inauguration of the museum by General Pinochet put us off. Michael asked at the front desk why the plaque was there, but the guy at the desk had no answer.

Then, as we entered the second room, we realized all the pieces of art in that room had been looted from Indigenous burial sites, so we left after maybe 15 minutes.

We then visited Constitution Plaza, site of La Moneda, a combination of presidential palace and seat of government.

For Chileans September 11 will always refer to the day in 1973 that the Chilean military, with the support of the U.S., launched a coup against the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende. And the most famous images from that day were the strafing of La Moneda by the Chilean Air Force, which used unguided rockets and cannon fire.

When we were visiting Sandra in Uruguay, she told us that Allende had arranged to go into exile, but he heard military radio communications indicating that his plane would never reach Cuba. So he delivered his final radio address, part of which is engraved on his statue in the plaza, and then committed suicide. The quotation on the plaque reads

[Go forward knowing that,] sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.

Pablo Neruda’s home in Santiago, called La Chascona, after his mistress, was the third museum we visited that day.

We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, but you can see some of the rooms here. Neruda, Chile’s most famous poet, also won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was friends with Gabriela Mistral. One of his most famous poems is “Ode to a Watermelon”:

ODE TO THE WATERMELON (Excerpt)
by Pablo Neruda 
…the round, magnificent,
star-filled watermelon.
It’s a fruit from the thirst-tree.
It’s the green whale of the summer.
The dry universe
all at once
given dark stars
by this firmament of coolness
lets the swelling
fruit
come down:
its hemispheres open
showing a flag
green, white, red,
that dissolves into
wild rivers, sugar,
delight!
Jewel box of water, phlegmatic
queen
of the fruitshops,
warehouse
of profundity, moon
on earth!
You are pure,
rubies fall apart
in your abundance,
and we
want
to bite into you,
to bury our
face
in you, and
our hair, and
the soul!
When we’re thirsty
we glimpse you
like
a mine or a mountain
of fantastic food,
but
among our longings and our teeth
you change
simply
into cool light
that slips in turn into
spring water
that touched us once
singing.

Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems

Currently, the watermelon has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance, because Israel punishes those who display the Palestinian flag. With its black seeds, green rind and red fruit, the watermelon serves as a stand-in. When we saw this apron, with a line of the poem in Spanish, Michael knew immediately that he wanted to give it to a Palestinian friend, who posted this picture on Facebook.

Finally, we encountered some beverages in Chile that we did not in any of the other countries we visited. I got spoiled by the cheap expresso drinks I was able to order in most of the places we ate. At this particular restaurant in Chile, I decided I would go for something simpler, and ordered cafe con leche, coffee with hot milk. Below is what I got. In Palestine, this type of coffee is a special drink that Palestinians serve to guests (despite the boycott), but for me, it symbolized a return to reality.

However, even though Chile doesn’t have cheap expresso drinks, it does have some interesting soft drinks. Top left is sugar cane juice with lime. Now, it didn’t even sound good to me, and it tasted just like it sounds: watered-down molasses with lime juice. I guess I just like trying new things.

Inca Cola is actually a Peruvian soda, with lemon verbena as the main flavor. Bilz, after Coca-Cola, is the most popular soda in Chile. The company describes the flavor as “fruit.” The pictures for Pap and Kem I downloaded from the internet. I didn’t actually see the former, and didn’t think to take a picture of the latter. One has the taste of papaya and the other the taste of pineapple. Guess which is which.

I believe next post will be the last of the trip.

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Museum of Memory in Santiago

The Museum of Memory in Chile had its own style, just like the museums in Uruguay and Argentina had their own style. Like Argentina’s museum, it is designed professionally, and makes the “disappeared” reappear. I think Chile’s museum tries to tell a story. How did this happen? What happened? Who made it happen? Who stopped it from happening.

For those who are interested in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, see my previous blog post about our friend Sandra’s work with the Salvador Allende Society in Uruguay.

At the entrance of the Museum of the Museum the walls exhibit the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

When you enter the museum, the first exhibit you see is the number of people from other countries that the Chilean regime killed.

While Argentina’s ESMA museum mentions that other memorials to the victims of the Dirty War exist, Chile’s Museum of Memory gives a visual representation and short description them all. The University of Santiago memorialized two of its professors with the colorful mural: Enrique Kirberg, and Víctor Jara, an internationally known musician, and Latin American icon.

Below is a brief summary in English of the drastic change in Chilean society when the dictatorship took charge.

The picture on the left shows an exhumation of a grave in Santiago. Prosecutors exhumed mass graves to gather evidence to indict the human rights abusers during the dictatorship. It says, “How did we come to deny the humanity of people?”

People around the world began to protest the human rights abuses in Chile, as they did those in Argentina and Uruguay.

Orlando Letelier was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat under the presidency of Salvador Allende. Tortured and imprisoned under Pinochet’s regime, he eventually moved to the U.S. where he held several academic positions. A car bomb explosion ordered by Pinochet killed Letelier and his U.S. secretary and interpreter, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, on September 21, 1976 in Washington, DC. The photo on the right is a picture of their memorial on Sheridan Circle in DC.

In the Buenos Aires Museum of Memory, the victims of torture describe in horrifying detail what happened to them. Chile’s museum takes a more clinical approach. For example,

One is forced to be present at the torture of others, many times family members and people one is close to, in order to provoke confessions. This method allows victims to project what could happen to them if they don’t collaborate.

It’s a different kind of horrifying.

Below are letters written home to families informing them of their loved ones’ deaths. The large letter was one a father wrote to his child from prison.

Walls filled with names of those whom the government killed. The lighting was terrible and you could barely read them. I adjusted the exposure on the photos to brighten the names.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, eventually some Chileans decided they had had enough of fear, and worrying about their the loved ones. The large black human-shaped poster says, “Maria Edith Vasquez. Did you forget me? YES___ NO___.”

Near the end of the Museum, it does its great “undisappearing” act by having the victims’ faces jut out from walls in a great hall. I think the treatment of the disappeared is also one of the differences between Chile’s museum and Argentina’s museum. The Argentina museum tried to tell as many stories of as many individuals as it could, and have their faces in as many places as it could.

Hundreds of pictures of people fastened to a wall.

Arpilleras (Ar-pee-YER-as) are a traditional type of Latin American Folk Art. We have several hanging in our front room. (I took a picture of this one on a slant to reduce the glare on the glass.) They are often quilted to had texture, and typically depict village life.

Chilean women, during and after the dictatorship, made arpilleras that reflected their stories. At one point General Pinochet forbade their sale. Here are some pictures I took, again at a slant, to reduce light reflecting of the glass. On the lower right, armed authorities shoot a man in a white shirt, who was standing among people in the street. The arpillera above seems to show monsters attacking. In the picture on the right, the arpillera in the lower left corner shows a a person sitting in a pool of blood, surrounded by barbed wire, while a sinister-looking black bird flies overhead. To the right, a group of women marches up a hill, where dark figures, possibly armed, await them. To the right of that, the lower arpillera shows a photo of another protest, with mothers holding up pictures of their children, and someone hold ing a sign that says, TRUTH/JUSTICE in Spanish.

For better photos of arpilleras created by Chilean women see the websites, Weblog of the Education for Peace Initiative at Prajnya and Chilean Arpilleras: A chapter of history written on cloth

From the beginning of the dictatorship, the regime encouraged people to spy on their fellow countrymen. The sign below says, roughly,

CHILEANS
The patriotic contribution of all citizens will facilitate the elimination of the extremists that still remain in the capital.
They are foreigners without a homeland and some Chilean fanatics that can no seem beyond their hate and desire for destruction.
REPORT THEM, PROVIDING CONCRETE AND TIMELY BACKGROUND TO THE FOLLOWING PHONE NUMBERS OR PERSONALLY AT ANY MILITARY UNIT.

Absolute privacy of those who provide information will be maintained. Don’t be afraid of the threats of extremists. The LAW and JUSTICE are on your side. Whoever is caught threatening a citizen will be subjected to the maximum penalty in the Tribunals during times of war.
Remember that indifferent citizens helped with their passivity to let Marxism almost destroy Chile.

CITIZEN, CONTRIBUTE TO THE CLEANING OUR HOMELAND OF INDESIRABLES.
Headquarters of the State.

The town of Pisgua had an internment camp previously used for male homosexuals under the dictatorship of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo between 1927 and 1931. Under the Pinochet regime, it became one of the country’s many detention/torture centers. A Catholic human rights organization demanded that a mass grave in the local cemetery be excavated in 1990. Due to the arid climate and the amount of salt in the soil, the twenty bodies inside were unusually well preserved and easy to identify. I don’t actually remember what the other photo is about, but it’s self-explanatory.

When the Pinochet dictatorship came into power, it shut down most of the newspapers, and saw that the others printed only positive things about the government. The papers and the pictures refer to a Red Cross visit to the internment cap at Pisagua. They speak of the “humane and just treatment” the prisoners receive, and how “well-ordered, disciplined and clean” the camp was. The photos show smiling prisoners.

I highly recommend Jacobo Timerman’s books, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number and The Longest War . In the first, he writes of his experience of detention and torture during the Argentina’s Dirty War because he was a Jew and the editor of La Opinion. In the second, he writes of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. I mention these books here, because an anecdote from the second book has stuck with me since I read it in the 1990s. On a trip for journalists to Southern Lebanon with the Israeli army, soldiers had the journalists talk to Lebanese civilians. They told the journalists how much better life was for them now that the Israeli military was in control of the region. Timerman instantly recognized what the expression on their faces meant. His face had assumed the same expression when the Red Cross had visited his prison, and he had told its representatives that the authorities at the prison were treating him well.

Below are letters that prisoners wrote to their families had to pass through a censor. Prisons even had a form for prisoners to fill out to send home to their families.

In 1988, Chile’s Constitutional Court ruled that the country should hold a plebiscite as per Article 64 of the Chilean Constitution. Fifty-six percent of the voters rejected the extension of Pinochet’s presidential term, in part because of an upbeat advertising campaign that focused on what Chile’s future could be without a dictatorship. Pinochet left power in 1989.

I took photo below, which commemorates the tenth anniversary of the museum’s creation, on our way out of the museum. The sign says, “Adios, General. Joy has arrived.”

Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that left over 3,000 Chileans dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners, and drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile. And yet, polling shows more than one-third of Chileans today justify the military overthrow of a democratically elected government. Sixty-six percent of respondents agreed with the statement that rather than worry about the rights of individuals, the country needs a firm government. Several people polled said that under Pinochet, there was less crime and the streets were cleaner. Others said he had saved Chile from Marxism.

Reading this article caused me to reflect how time launders the crimes of powerful people. In this country, Nixon became a venerable political commentator after illegally spying on journalists, authorizing the break-in of the Democratic National Party’s headquarters, covering it up—and massively bombing Cambodia. Henry Kissinger, whom NPR called a “legendary diplomat and foreign policy scholar,” and was often treated as a bon vivant by the press, has the blood of 3 to 4 million people on his hands.

I generally support not judging people by the worst thing they’ve ever done. However, for people in power, it’s different. They rarely face accountability for the crimes they commit and the lives they ruin. So they remain unrepentant, and their victims never receive justice.

I also think that people have a way of looking back at the “good ol’ days” and thinking life was better then. Leave It to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show certainly depict spaces where people could live safely and largely harmoniously. But both shows filmed in eras when black people could not vote in southern states, and women could not have credit cards in their own names or take legal action for sexual harassment in the workplace. Sheriff Andy would never have tolerated the Ku Klux Klan in Mayberry, we know, but at the time it was filmed, southern sheriffs not only tolerated, but were often members of the organization. They also gave allowed lynch mobs free access to the prisoners in their jails.

In 2023 Kevin Clardy, the Sheriff of McCurtain County, Oklahoma was caught on tape wishing he still lived in an era when Black people were lynched.

And that’s why we need memory museums—to remind people what the good ol’ days were really all about and that the people in power at the time were monsters.

Perhaps the closest thing we have to a Memorial museum in the U.S. is the Legacy Museum and the Memorial to victims of lynching in Alabama, which we visited a couple years ago. Michael and I found it one of the most profound experiences of our trip.

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Decompressing with Tuti in Lujan de Cuyo

Photo taken from back seat of a man with gray hair in an orange checked shirt driving and a woman in a red shirt with medium length gray hair in passenger seat. In the distance you can see the lower ranges of the Andes Mountains
Tuti took us on a drive to the foothills of the Andes Mountains.

I was surprised to find out that I took so few pictures when we visited Michael’s friend Tuti Berlak. Because I remember my time with her and her daughter Maia was one of my favorite parts of the trip.

On the night before we flew to Mendoza from Buenos Aires. I finally took my braids down from the wedding hairdo. I had discovered, as the bruise from my fall in Medellin faded, that I had a hematoma in the center of the bruise (and still have it as of this writing), which explains why it hurt so much to move that thigh muscle. When I googled around to find out info about hematomas, I discovered that you’re not supposed to fly with them. I had already taken three flights , but thought I should check in with my doctor. He told me to take 325 mg of aspirin—which means I was kind of nauseous for the rest of my trip.

Woman wearing blue camisole with long braids hanging down beyond the frame of the picture. She has large dark framed glasses
Women wearing large dark glasses frames and blue camisole taking photo of the back of her head in mirror

Mendoza is a city near the foothills of the Andes, and is cooler than Buenos Aires. Lujan de Cuyo, where Tuti and her daughter Maia live, is even closer, so the weather is cooler yet, although warm by our standards during the day. Here’s the view flying in:

Views of the farmland around Mendoza, Argentina, with the foothills of the Andes Mountains in the background

Tuti has an interesting history. Like many of Michael’s friends from Tel Aviv University and Kerem Shalom, she left Argentina during the Dirty War. In the late 1970s, she left for Mexico, where she met her ex and they ended up in jail for because of their political activities against the Argentinian military regime. The Israeli Embassy got Tuti out, but her ex was Argentinian and had no one to advocate for him. While he was in jail, he made this plaque and gave it to Michael as a gift, which we have in our small collection of Che Guevara tchotchkes.1 Mexico deported them both as political exiles to Sweden. Before they split they had their two daughters, Anahi and Maia. Tuti moved back to Argentina.

She now lives near the her parents’ summer cottage. Below is the view outside of her current home. Even though this post will be shorter than the others, I think my time with Tuti and her daughter Maia was one of my favorite parts of the trip. They are relaxing people, and sitting on the porch with them and their two big old dogs, was just what I needed.

Tuti’s daughter Anahi is an artist and the room where we slept was full of her mosaics. Below are some of her instagram photos of the pieces in our bedroom, following a picture of herself. You also might want to check out her Instagram feed.

In both Uruguay and Argentina we learned the importance of mate (pronounced MAH-tay). On the plane to Montevideo, we sat across from a guy who asked the flight attendant to fill his thermos with hot water, and then sipped for the rest of the flight. Tuti told us the that Argentinian stereotype Uruguayans as always walking around with a thermos in one arm and a mate cup in the other.

Although Sandra had given me a few sips of her mate , I really learned how to drink it with Tuti. You fill the cup with dry leaves and then push them back with a bombilla until there is a small space to pour water. Then you sip the water with the dual purpose bombilla like the ones below.

5 metal straws with objects at end for mashing dried leaves in tea
Mariano-J, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tuti told us that the drinking mate is meant to be done socially, with everyone sharing the same cup. At the height of the Covid pandemic, when she went to meetings, people brought their own cups, but she said it wasn’t the same. Mate is an acquired taste. It’s bitter, like coffee and tea, but I acquired it.

woman with sleeveless blue top and gray hair prepares cup of mate.
Tuti telling us about mate with Maia in the background.

Before we left, reluctantly, on my part, anyway, I decided it was time for the last remnants of the wedding hairdo to go away. For our departure to Chile from the Mendoza airport the next morning, I was wearing my normal braids.

  1. Michael wishes me to point out that tchotchkes are called chochchadas in Nicaraguan Spanish. He also thinks the fact that we have a Dome of the Rock replica made by a Palestinian political prisoner means we have a collection of political prisoner tchotchkes. ↩︎

ESMA Museum and Site of Memory

Photo of white building with four pillars. On the top is written "Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada." A blue banner drops down between the two left pillars reading, "Espacio para la Memorial"

The Armed Forces of Argentina installed the first ESMA (School of Navy Mechanics) institutions in 1975. Despite the name, the military/security state always intended to use them as clandestine centers for the torture, interrogation, rape, illegal detention and murder of people whom they deemed not worthy of membership in society. They accomplished all these atrocities with the help of U.S. tax dollars.

As I said when I wrote about Uruguay’s Museum of Memory, the museum in Buenos Aires reflects a more professional use of designers and certainly a greater availability of funds. But the dictatorship had these detention centers all over Argentina, and people in other regions have set up smaller memory museums in their locations as well..

I took the below pictures of these exhibits on the outside of the museum, because they have English at the bottom, explaining what happened inside. If you click on them, you should be able to read the explanations. We saw the stencil commemorating Tomas Canataro on the outside of the building. I wondered if he had been a union leader, journalist, or some famous Argentinian dissident.

But when I looked him up in the Museum archives, I saw the following,


[Translated from Spanish]
Tomas was born on October 22, 1941 in Villa del Totoral, province of Córdoba. Married and father of three children, he worked as a driver in a construction company. He was kidnapped on August 3, 1978 from his home in Villa Concepción, San Martín, province of Buenos Aires. He was 36 years old. He is still missing.

Archivo Provincial de la Memoria. “Archivo Provincial de la Memorial – Memorial – TOMAS RICARDO CANATARO SANTOLUCITO None.” Accessed April 3, 2024. https://apm.gov.ar/presentes/detalle/2467.

So what had he done to incur the displeasure of the authorities? Did he have friends or family members they were looking for? Had someone overheard him criticizing the government? Who put up the stencil? His children?

“Presente” is something sung at memorial services to indicate that the deceased are still a part of the living and remain in their hearts and minds. Every year, hundreds of people sing it as people call out the names of those killed by trainees at the School of the Americas (which include Argentinian Officers) in Fort Bending, Georgia. It was one of the most spiritual protests I ever participated in.

We went inside the Central Pavilion, where Navy students had done their exercise. It is now dedicated to the 30,000 kidnapped, tortured, murdered and disappeared Argentinians. If the museum has a central theme it is to “undisappear” people. The dictatorship sought to sow terror among the population by making people disappear—and it considered them disposable, worth less than animals. The museum puts their faces everywhere, and includes their thumbnail histories to bring them back to life.

You will see I had some trouble getting all the faces on the windows, because the wall is so long.

Also around the room were testimonies before the Argentine Human Rights Commission of three women who managed to survive their time in ESMA.

The plaque below in particular struck me. Modifying Google Translate, I paraphrased it:

“It is in the “Capuchá” that one realized that contact with the outside world no longer exists. The prisoner has nothing that protects or defends [him or her.] The sequestration is complete. This sensation of vulnerability, isolation, and fear is very difficult to describe. It must be, however, the closest thing to Hell.”

Outside the Pavilion were exhibits of activists who wanted to make Argentina a more just and humane place. When I saw Patricia Roisenblit, I thought maybe the family’s name, was changed from Michael’s family name generations ago: Rosenblatt. However, now I think it’s more likely that it derives from Rosenblüt/Rosenbluth. Anyway, as I was googling around, I came across the name of Rosa Tarkovsky de Roisinblit, she was one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and was a founder of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Patricia was 8 months pregnant when she and her husband were disappeared. The Air Force Commander who kidnapped, tortured and killed the couple received a sentence of 25 years. The Air Force Civilian worker who took the baby, knowing where it had come from, received a sentence of 12 years. Rosa is alive and 104 years old.

I wanted to take pictures of all the activists, but as I looked down the long walk I knew that I could spend all day doing so.

However, one of the activists in particular stood out to me for some reason, possibly because the details of her life seemed like they could have been those of any kind-hearted person. Possibly because her face looks vaguely familiar, like someone I could have gone to school with. She grew up in a house with a garden, and her little sister remembers her as a friend and protector. She was youth minister in a Methodist church. The kids in her group gave her a Mafalda doll because of her brown frizzy hair and because she wanted to change the world for the better.

At the university, she was not as interested in participating in political activities as she was in working with poor children and listening to workers and homemakers. She later joined the Peronist Youth party, where she met Reuben Stockdale. Her sister remembers them always having noisy, lively debates together. They both worked in a textile factory for a while, presumably to be closer to the workers for whom they were advocating.

The authorities kidnapped Inés as she left work in 1976. She was two months pregnant. Reuben, who should have fled the country, as people associated with disappeared people typically did, decided to remain in Argentina and look for her. He was kidnapped in 1977. They both remain disappeared.

Inés Cobo. ¡Presente!

We next went to a small building dedicated to the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, whom I have mentioned in previous blogs

In addition to their regular Thursday public witnesses at the plaza, Grandmothers of the Plaza Del Mayo began Marches of Resistance in 1981. The atrocities were becoming more widely known internationally, and they wanted to keep up the pressure. Each march had a theme. RETURN OF THE LIVING CHILDREN TO THEIR FAMILIES “With our lives we carried them. With our lives, we love them.” RETURN OF THE DETAINEES-DISAPPEARED/ PUNISHMENT FOR THE GUILTY “The Plaza [belongs to] the Mothers and not to the cowards.” AGAINST THE LAW OF AMNESTY FOR THE APPEARANCE OF THE LIVING DETAINEES-DISAPPEARED. “There were no mistakes, there were no excesses. There were only the murderers in the military [who were part of] the process.”

And as always, the pictures of the abducted stare the visitor in the face. The museum refuses to let them disappear.

The military, in a sadistic form of execution that extended torture to the very end, often killed its captives by flying them over the River Platte or the ocean and dropping them from the plane or helicopter, hands and feet bound, into the water.1 They referred to these prisoners as “transfers.” Sandra told us she remembers the bodies washing up on the beaches of Uruguay.

I took this picture outside the museum. Apple photos only identifies it as being in the Nuñez neighborhood, where the museum is located. It says, “A tribute to the popular 2activists, the detainees disappeared by state terrorism in the ESMA neighborhood. Memory and Justice. March 24, 2013.”

As I’ve prepared this blog post I’ve reflected on the proxy war that the U.S. and the Soviet Union fought on the continents of Latin America, Africa and Asia for decades, leaving behind a legacy of torture, slaughter and other atrocities. On the part of the U.S. it was all in the name of fighting communism.

I am almost certain that most of the powerbrokers in the U.S. who sent money and weapons to the Argentine junta never read Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, regarded as the foundation of Capitalism. Marx literally believed that workers should control the means of production, that is, they should make all the decisions about how a factory, farm, etc. is run, and all the profits should be split between them. He did not believe that the state should control the means of production.

Adam Smith believed that productive labor creates wealth, and self-interest motivates people to put their resources to best use. But before he wrote Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of the Moral Sentiments in which he describe a social system that would ensure justice and welfare for all. He always assumed that people had read the earlier book as a companion to the later book. When he visited India, and saw the misery that the British East India Company inflicted on workers in the textile mills, he wrote that to prohibit a people,

from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind”. 

“Adam Smith and the British East India Company: A Perspective on Competitiveness.” Tax Justice Network, 30 Apr. 2015, https://taxjustice.net/2015/04/30/adam-smith-and-the-british-east-india-company-a-perspective-on-competitiveness/.

Thus, predatory Capitalism, according to Adam Smith, is not Capitalism at all.

Communism and Capitalism are simply economic systems devised by two well-meaning men who wanted people to thrive. Authoritarianism was never part of the package. Treating workers like dirt was never part of the package. Creating hundreds of new billionaires, while the middle and working classes become ever more impoverished was never part of the package.

Acts 2:44-45 says that the first Christians “held all things in common,” which essentially means they were communists. I guess Priscilla and Aquila, the tentmakers who mentored Paul in Acts 18 were tentmakers, so I guess that makes them capitalists–or communists if they shared profits with Paul equally. It doesn’t matter much.

But committing atrocities against human beings over economic ideologies does matter

Epilogue: Patricia Erb, daughter of Mennonite missionaries in Argentina was kidnapped while she was a student at the University of Buenos Aires. Her statement to the U.S. State Department, began,

I,  Patricia Ann Erb, age 19, United States citizen, feel it my duty as a human being
and as Christian, to communicate to national and international organizations what I saw and experienced during my abduction and imprisonment by the Armed Forces of Argentina in the military headquarters of Campo de llayo.

Al a student at the University of Buenos Aires l participated in a student organization sponsored by the  University with delegates from the various classes in the University. As a sociology major I participated along with other sociology students in fieldwork in the poverty ghettos.

Statment, Patricia Erb, to U.S. State Department. National Security Archive, 31 Dec. 1976, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/6020963/National-Security-Archive-Doc-14-Patricia-Erb-s. National Security Archive.

Because she was a U.S. citizen, the Embassy obtained her release. When she returned to the States, she made it her mission to tell as many people as possible what was going on in Argentina. A friend of mine at Bluffton College heard one of her talks, and said she talked about her rape by one of the Argentine soldiers. As he was raping her, she noticed a gold cross around his neck. She told him she was a Christian, and asked him how he, a fellow Christian, could be doing this to her. He stopped. But so many more soldiers wearing crosses did not.

Photo of Patricia Erb who recently received an honorary doctorate from Vancouver Island University

  1. Flying from Montevideo to Buenos Aires to was essentially a flight over the Rio Platte River basin. It looks like an ocean from the air. ↩︎
  2. “Popular,” in this context isn’t about trends. It means “of the people,” often used to refer to peasants or the working classes. In this case, it refers to those who struggled for the rights of all people in Argentina to live with dignity, receive fair wages, and be regarded as equals to everyone else in Argentina. ↩︎

First Two Days in Buenos Aires

At the Buenos Aires Airport, I noticed that the junk food had labels warning of health risks. The labels on the chocolate bar, for example, warn that it has too much sugar, fat, saturated fat, and too many calories.

Since we arrived too early to check into our apartment, a cousin of our new son-in-law, Eric, allowed us to drop our luggage at his apartment building. This pleasant yard is on the roof of his building.

As we walked around looking for a place to eat, we noticed some street art, mostly used for advertising.

Also Argentinians taking dancing lessons on the street.

The drink Michael ordered at the place we stopped for lunch had yet another warning. Because it contained artificial sweeteners, children should not drink it. I wondered why they would name a soft drink, “to be.”

We stopped at the AMIA (Argentine Israelite Mutual Association—the equivalent of Jewish Community Centers in the U.S) which had strict security outside, because of the July 18, 1994 bombing that killed 85 people and injured 300. Ansar Allah, a Palestinian front for Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for the attack However the investigation into the incident was incompetent, and driven by political interests, so today it’s not really “solved,” as such.

We had made an appointment to visit the Jewish museum ahead of time. Turns out, they are very picky about who they let in. A couple from Ithaca, NY wanted to visit but they had only copies of their passports, and that was not sufficient. Pro-tip: I have traveled to five continents and I have never found authorities in any countries who found a photocopy of a passport valid for identification.

In the first room was a permanent art installation meant to indicate a Shabbat family dinner for missing people. Originally, it had shown photos of people who had disappeared during the Dirty War, but now the photos are of Israelis Hamas is holding hostage in Gaza.

Maurycy Minkowski

A small room displayed a temporary exhibit of the works by the artist Maurycy Minkowski. Famous for painting on themes of immigration, Minkowski eventually ended up in Buenos Aires, “where,” the exhibit notes without further explanation, “he lost his life tragically.” Of course I wanted to find out what actually happened to him and found the following on Wikipedia. An illness had left him deaf as a child, but he got the education he needed to work as an artist in Europe:

In early November 1930, he went to Argentina to help prepare the first overseas exhibition of his paintings. Later that month, unable to hear the honking of an oncoming taxi, he was struck and killed. The exhibition was presented as a posthumous tribute to his work, under the aegis of the Jewish Association of Argentina. In 1931, a committee was established to raise funds for the purchase of his works.

In 1942, a great majority of his works were auctioned off. Most were purchased by the “Fundación IWO” (the Argentine branch of YIVO) and were stored at the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina. A few of the paintings were destroyed and many suffered some degree of damage in 1994, when the building was destroyed by a car-bomb, killing 85 people.



Brief summaries of significant eras for the Argentinian Jewish community.

First, massive waves of immigration took place between 1889 and 1930, for the same reasons that Jews were fleeing to the United States and other countries. The pogroms in Russia and Eastern European countries made emigration a life and death matter.

In the Decade of Infamy, marked by a 1930 coup, Great Depression, electoral fraud to keep conservative parties in power and another coup in 1943, were a time of rising antisemitism. Juan Peron, who was a colonel in the army that overthrew the government in 1943, was a sympathizer of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

Under the first Peronist government, antisemitism rose sharply, but it did in the U.S., Canada, and Europe as well. Despite Peron’s fascism, he appointed Jews to positions in the government and passed a law allowing Jewish army privates to celebrate Jewish holidays while they were serving in the military. U.S. Ambassador George Messersmith said, after a visit to Argentina in 1947, “There is not as much social discrimination against Jews here as there is right in New York or in most places at home….” Historian Raanan Rein has noted, ” “Fewer anti-Semitic incidences took place in Argentina during Perón’s rule than during any other period in the 20th century.” Frequent coup d’etats occurred in the 1950s-60s. Fragile civilian governments rose and fell. An urban guerrilla group who expressed an affinity for Nazi ideals, the Tacuara Nationalist Movemen,t opposed secular society and liberal democracy:

The MNT (“Tacuara Nationalist Movement”) maintained contacts with the police as well as with some former Nazi bureaucrats exiled in Argentina, which helped them gain easy access to weapons, an advantage which put them apart from other political organizations. They were also engaged in racketeering, demanding a “revolutionary tax” from many Jewish shops in the Once (once means ‘eleven’) neighborhood of Buenos Aires, until the shops organized themselves to confront the MNT together. At first mainly engaged in street fights with other rival students’ organizations, in particular concerning the conflict between nonreligious and religious schooling, the MNT also engaged in antisemitic acts (such as vandalism in the Jewish cemetery of La Tablada in 1959, etc.). The MNT’s antisemitism became even stronger after Adolf Eichmann‘s May 1960 kidnapping by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, leading to a violent antisemitic campaign which lasted until 1964, when the MNT was almost completely dismantled.[20]This led the Jewish association DAIA to pressure the government into taking actions against MNT.

The peak was reached on August 17, 1960, when MNT members from Sarmiento National High School attacked Jewish pupils and injured a 15-year-old, Edgardo Trilnik, during the celebrations in honor of José de San Martín, Argentina’s national hero in the war of independence. From then on, the MNT perpetrated acts of intimidation against the Jewish community, including bombing synagogues and other Jewish institutions and defacing the buildings with antisemitic graffiti.[20] Following Eichmann’s execution in 1962, the MNT launched 30 antisemitic attacks. On June 21, 1962, they kidnapped a 19-year-old Jewish girl, Graciela Sirota, tortured her, and scarred her with Swastika signs.[20] In retaliation against this odious act, which raised public outrage, the DAIA on June 28, 1962, stopped all the activities of Jewish trade, supported by students (many high schools went on strike) and various political organizations, trade unions and intellectuals. These violent actions finally led the government to issue decree3134/63 which prohibited, in 1963, any MNT or GRN activity. However, the influence of the secret services effectively nullified this decree.

“Tacuara Nationalist Movement.” In Wikipedia, February 17, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tacuara_Nationalist_Movement&oldid=1208500018.

In 1973, Peron returned to power. He died in office, and his widow, Isabella Peron succeeded him. The army, led by Commander-in-Chief General Jorge Rafael Videla, overthrew her government in 1976. Thus began the bloodiest episode in Argentina’s modern history, which the next blog post will cover. Cabildo a Catholic Church publication peddled antisemitic tropes heavily during the dictatorship. It falsely asserted that 3 million Jews lived in Argentina when the number was a tenth of that. Even though Jews represented only 2% of Argentina’s population, they were more than 10% of those the Argentine Secret Service kidnapped and disappeared. A lot of Michael’s friends at Tel Aviv University were young people from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay who had fled the coup regimes in those countries.

The final placard talks about the democratic reopening of Argentina.

The museum’s synagogue has four marble memorials for mass casualties that Argentina’s Jewish community has suffered over the years. Two list the names of those killed and disappeared under the “Argentinian Dirty War” from 1974-1983. Another lists the name of 29 killed during the Israeli Embassy bombing in 1992, although there appear to be more than 29 names on it, and I cannot read the brass plate from the picture. The fourth records the 85 who died in the July 1994 bombing.

After our visit to the Jewish museum, we headed out to the Plaza de Mayo, the scene of some of the momentous events in Argentinian history. The Palacio Rosado (Pink Palace) houses Argentina’s seat of government. The backlit pyramid was erected to commemorate Argentina’s 1811 revolution against Spain. That square rock lists the names of the soldiers who died in the pivotal battle of Tucumán, during Argentina’s War of Independence.

A large pink palace-type structure sits across a wide plaza.

Political protest has also characterized the history of the Plaza. The Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo probably deserve the biggest accolades for the length of the their protests—so long they are now the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore scarves made from their children’s diapers initially, which evolved into plain white scarves on which they embroidered the names of their children whom the army had disappeared. Meeting weekly at the Plaza de Mayo, they demanded that the government return their children. “You took them alive; we want them back alive,” was one of their chants. They also deserve accolades for their bravery.The military kidnapped, tortured and murdered some of the Mothers, as well as French nuns who supported them, but more mothers kept joining the group in the Plaza every week.

The black base extols heroes from Argentina’s War of Independence from Spain, but I like what someone has added at the end: “For all the dead human beings, and those who struggled to save them.” The Hebrew reads,

“Anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world”

Mishnah 5:4

I was trying to figure out what all the the rocks were doing at the base of the pyramid erected to celebrate Argentina’s Independence, and then I realized that the people designated on the rocks had all died in 2020-21. Apparently, they remained from a protest regarding how the Argentinian government had handled the Covid epidemic.

At the end of the day as we took a taxi back to the apartment where we were staying, we noticed our driver had a quotation by Martin Luther King on the back of his seat: “It is always the right time to do the right thing.” It seemed an appropriate way to end the day.

Two days in Uruguay

L. Sandra, M. Gabi, Sandra’s niece visiting from Spain, R. Michael

Michael met Sandra at his kibbutz, Kerem Shalom, in the 1980s. A dedicated socialist and an exile from the Uruguayan dictatorship she wanted to experience the socialism as practiced by the kibbutz movement in Israel. She later returned to Uruguay for various reasons and abhors the current state of Israeli politics.

Our first day after landing, Sandra took us out to a restaurant built over a tunnel that Tupamaro guerrillas had dug to free political prisoners held in the Punto Carretas Prison.

Note that I still have my hair-do from the wedding. Summer was heading into fall in Uruguay, and the weather was warm and humid. However, Uruguayos do not seem to consume the amount of liquids that the weather required. I had not drunk half that glass of passion fruit lemonade. That’s the amount the waitress served us.

We then walked to the prison which has become…a shopping mall, complete with McDonalds and Starbucks. Yes, it is disgusting. Sandra, who worked at a municipal office nearby, said that for a long time she avoided walking over to Punto Carretas to make photocopies. Dissidents trying to reclaim the long history of democracy in Uruguay had spent years of their lives here, suffering torture and humiliation, all so young Urugayos1 could enjoy their Big Macs and Mochaccinos there one day.

What remains to indicate that Punto Carretas was once a prison are the tiny windows common to most prisons, and a couple explanatory placards. I’ve added a picture of a cell at a federal prison in Oregon for comparison. The memorial for the prisoners and their families did not go up until 2018. On the back, the text says that the these placards are dedicated to the families of the prisoners because of what they endured over the years when their loved ones were in prison, and lists the ex-prisoners responsible for erecting this modest memorial.

Afterwards, Sandra took us up to the top of City Hall, 20 stories tall, where visitors may see a panorama of Montevideo. Of course, I was also interested in the plants. The attraction featured a little café, where we bought drinks, and Sandra bought us each a bonbon.

Across Latin America, Salvador Allende is regarded as a martyr of the Cold War. The people of Chile elected him in a free and fair election, but because he was a socialist, Henry Kissinger famously said, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The U.S. thus supported a military coup against Allende. Tens of thousands of Chileans were imprisoned, tortured and disappeared2 over the next 17 years and the economy, which had improved the lives of ordinary Chileans under Allende, immediately tanked, with inflation spiraling to 376 percent.

Isabel Allende asked Sandra to be the representative of the Allende family in Uruguay. The Salvador Allende Society in Montevideo, of which she is a member, installed this small plaza in his honor. (Dusk had set in, so I apologize for the dimness of the photos.) The quotation on the plaque comes from Allende’s final radio address, which he broadcast as the Chilean airforce was bombing the presidential palace on September 11, 1973.

[Much] sooner rather than later, the great boulevards will once again open up and free men will walk down them to build a better society.

We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán. Temple University Press, 2016. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/book.64137.

Apparently, Allende was a Freemason. Michael had attended a Freemason convention in Rochester as a translator for a Nicaraguan relative who was also a Freemason and heard them expressing reactionary conservative political views, but evidently Freemasons can also be socialists. George Washington, Simón Bolivar, Thurgood Marshall, Richard Pryor, John Glenn, and Salvador Allende. Who knew?

The next day, before we went to the Museum of Memory, Sandra told us of her (underground) work to bring the children of Uruguayan exiles from Europe in 1983 to visit their parents in prison, or simply to know their family still in Chile. The mass group of 154 children—aged 3 and 17 years old—traveled alone to Montevideo. They arrived to cheering crowds chanting, “Tus padres volverán!” (Your parents will return), which became the title of a 2015 documentary film about the event. The filmmakers interviewed six adults about the impact the trip had had on them. In several cases, it was not positive. One boy considered his Dutch stepfather his real father, because he had been just a toddler when he left, and his Chilean father’s desperate overtures to assert his fatherhood were painful to him as an adult. For another boy, prison had turned his father into an angry, abusive person, and he wanted nothing to do with him or Uruguay. He eventually moved back to Denmark and raised his family there.

Watching the film with Sandra added a lot to the experience, because she supplemented the narrative with background.. She also kept pointing out a little boy she was in charge of while he was in the country. The visit of the children was a factor in the fall of the dictatorship in 1985, Sandra said, because the junta and the rest of the country saw how much popular support there was for prisoners and those in exile. When the children returned to Europe, she went with them, because she guessed the junta knew about her involvement in the event and she would be safer there.

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon at the Museum of Memory, which the founders laid out as a park, complete with playground. The banners in the front are protesting lack of municipal support for museum workers.

When you enter, the first room tells you about the first days of coup in 1973, the people killed, and the protests against it. A pro-junta newspaper, Macha, put out and edition with the headline, “IT IS NOT A DICTATORSHIP.” Pro tip: if you have to tell people it’s not a dictatorship, it’s a dictatorship. Also note the Social Credo put out by the Uruguayan Methodist church, which denounced political repression, among other things. They were extremely brave to do so.

If you enlarge the photo with the QR code and scan it, you will find the story of Susana Pintos, one of the students killed by state repression between 1968 and 1985.

As is the case with all authoritarian governments—Communist, Fascist or Monarchical—artists who dissent from the official narrative at best find their work banned and at worst end up dead. If you want to see some of the musicians whom the Uruguayan ruling junta banned, scan the QR code. On the Jose Carbajal album, he recorded songs by musicians whom the government had disappeared.

On April 21, 1974 Uruguayan Armed Forces and police shot several rounds of ammunition into the house where Diana Maidanik (21), Silvia Reyes (21 and 6 months pregnant), and Laura Raggio (19) were sleeping, killing all three. The counterinsurgent military–police Joint Forces said they were looking for Reyes’s husband and falsely claimed that the women had died in a confrontation. Uruguayans refer to the incident as the “muchachas de abril,” or “girls of April.”

Other rooms of the museum displayed various items from prison. The small handwritten item propped on the rusty tin is A History of the Vietnamese Communist Party, written out on cigarette rolling papers. The letter is addressed to a woman named Amanda who was in charge of the children who visited their parents in prison, which was often a frightening experience for them (Amanda did not seem to make it better.)

Prisoners often spent time making little gifts for their families at home, with whatever materials they had available. However, the pink and blue handkerchief was sent from Switzerland to a prisoner, and the prison authorities refused it. Years later, it found its way to her, however due to the diligence of a Swiss postmaster.

An estimated 500,000 Uruguayans fled the country during the 17 years of dictatorship. In their exile, they helped to build international solidarity for imprisoned Uruguayans and those who had disappeared. Swedish activists, in particular, noticed that the plight of those living under the Argentinean and Chilean dictatorships received more attention, and decided to take up the cause of Uruguayans.

Here’s a display on the children who went into exile and the visit that Sandra helped organize for children in Europe to visit Chile.

Most of those killed in Uruguay by the government or its proxies were never found, and Uruguayans today still hold protests, demanding information on what happened to them. (The military government granted itself amnesty before turning over the government to democratic elections in 1985. Some of the highest profile military officers eventually faced trial, but the people below them who carried out their orders died not.) These processions happen in complete silence, with participants holding photographs of the missing people as they walk. The poster below records the 2022 “March of Silence.”

When we were visiting, the museum’s Board of Directors was meeting. Sandra said they were all involved with the struggle some way. Perhaps some fought with the Tupamaro guerrillas (who eventually became a political party), or spent time in prison, or became exiles, or were family members of disappeared people. In any case, they were delighted we were visiting and plied us with delicious cheesy snacks.

The pots and pans represent a traditional form of protest in which everyone comes out of their homes for a few minutes and beats on pans as loud as they can to show their displeasure with the government.

According to Wikipedia,

During the dictatorship, more than 5000 people were arrested for political reasons and almost 10% of Uruguayans emigrated from the country. Torture extended until the end of Uruguayan dictatorship in 1985. Uruguay had the highest number per capita of political prisoners in the world. Almost 20% of population were arrested for shorter or longer periods. MLN (Tupamaro) heads were isolated in prisons and subjected to repeated acts of torture. 
Around 180 Uruguayans are known to have been killed during the 12-year military rule from 1973 to 1985. Most were killed in Argentina and other neighbouring countries, with only 36 of them having been killed in Uruguay. Many of those killed were never found, and the missing people have been referred to as the “disappeared”, or “desaparecidos” in Spanish

Michael and I would go on to see Museums of Memory in Argentina and Chile. They looked more professional, developed by designers and architects, but at the museum in Montevideo, you could feel the beating hearts of the people behind it. In 1973, the entire population of Uruguay was about 3 million, and half lived in Montevideo. That’s a bit less than the population of Chicago. And I can kind of see the people of Chicago putting together a museum like this, when they knew their resources would be limited.

After the museum, we went to the market to eat at a seafood restaurant, where I had eel for the first time. (Meh.) On the way, we passed this building, and I realized we had arrived during Carnival.

On the way back to Sandra’s, I took pictures of graffiti, because that’s a thing now for me. The signs read, “What is your escape action? and “Philosophy is so dangerous.”

Almost forgot, the national dish of Uruguay is the chivito, a sandwich with ham, bacon, cheese, beef, hardboiled egg, and tomato with variations. “Heart attack in a bun” translates into Spanish as “Ataque al corazón en un bollo.”

When we arrived several days later in Mendoza, Argentina, our friend there told us “Uruguayans are just so”—she then hugged herself and rocked back and forth. We agreed. They’re very nice, and Montevideo is a very pleasant place to visit.

  1. In Uruguay and Argentina, the consonant “y” sound is pronounced “sh”, so, “Uruguashos.”

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  2. In Spanish, when they speak of the authorities “disappearing” someone, it means that they have kidnapped, probably tortured and almost always killed that person. ↩︎

Last Day in Bogotá

Good-bye to Camila

Photo of Camila Reyes, smiling. She has long, wavy brown hair and brown eyes.
Camila Reyes, founder of Resuena

The picture I had of Camila for our final day together, didn’t really express who she was. So I took something from a webpage describing her what she does. Her current work is with Resuena, an organization “set out on a dream to expand the access to Nonviolent Communication in Colombia so that it becomes part of the day-to-day culture.”

Below is the bad picture I took of Camila at a diner for breakfast. She really wasn’t unhappy at the time. One of the aspects of Colombian cuisine that Michael really appreciated is the soups, and the fact that Colombians eat soup at breakfast and lunch. I remember with fondness Colombian pastries on previous trip. I

t struck me that this simple diner had works of original art all over the walls. I said it seemed like I saw art everywhere I went in Bogota. Camila told me its presence was especially prevalent in her bohemian neighborhood.

A love of beauty and plants also helps describe Camila’s character. She has plants in every room of her apartment except the utility room. I documented them here:

A tiled gallery of various plants in different rooms of an apartment

We decided to go to the Bogota public market and eat all the fruits we hadn’t eaten yet (and we had eaten a lot of different fruits.) The excursion turned into buying fruit that doesn’t need to be turned into juice. Of the fruits you see here, we liked the mangosteen the best (the little brown ones). Since Colombia is full of microclimates, almost anything can be grown. Camila also took us to visit her friend who organizes community-supported agriculture (and allows artists to use her space, because, well, it’s Bogotá).

What else? By the time I got to Bogotá, the bruise I got from my fall in Medellin had grown considerably worse. As it dissipated over time, I realized it had hematoma at the center, which explains why the muscle in my thigh hurt so much when I moved it. I used one of my hiking sticks as a cane for the rest of the trip.

In a moment alone with Camila shortly before we left for the airport, she was discussing her goals for the next few years. She then asked me about my goals. Without thinking, I said, “I’d like to make compassion cool again.” She asked how I planned on accomplishing that, and I said, “Well, maybe that’s what my next novel will be about. Right before we left, she handed me this pin and told me, “This is to remind you that your job now is to make compassion cool again.”

Back to Bogotá

And a graffiti tour

Clothed animals that look like a cross between mice and rabbits flee from pink lightning

Our guide Camilo told us this artist is famous for painting animals in apocalyptic situations

Returning to Camila’s place gave me a chance to rest my knee—which I did the day after a graffiti tour of Bogota with a young man from a tour company run by Camila’s friend.  His name was Camilo, and he had been an art student at one of the more than 100 universities in Bogota. He went all the way back to graffiti as a movement in the 1960s, to Cornbread, a young man who began ,spray-painting, “ I am Cornbread“ on walls all over New York City to impress a girl. People began to ask, “Who is this Cornbread guy?“ However, when the girl rejected him, Cornbread wrote on a wall, “Cornbread has retired.” The graffiti movement started in New York and then Philadelphia, and soon began spreading. Bogotá is now the global center of street art, with 500 km of painted walls.

Tagging is the most basic form of graffiti, in which individuals or “crews” paint their logos on walls. The higher up on a wall, the more street cred you have. Camilo says he has seen them as high as three stories. The artist that painted the two homeless kids kissing (whom he had seen on the streets) incorporated tags from all over the city into their pants. The painting is called The Invisibles, which, Camilo said, is appropriate, because graffiti is a way that invisible people use to make themselves feel visible.

Tags evolved into “bombs,” huge, balloon-like letters. When Camilo began his career as a street artist, he used stencils, and only then began to appreciate how much skill it took to spray paint these bombs freehand.

Felipe Diego Becerra used Félix the cat as his logo. One night in 2011, as he was painting a wall, the police shot him in the back. At the hospital, the doctor asked his parents why the the police had shot him. When they told him the reason, he asked them to quickly come into Diego’s room and take a photo of his hands covered in blue paint. The police accused him of pulling a gun on them. Graffiti artists all over the city went on a 24-hour graffiti-thon, in protest, many of them painting pictures of Felix the Cat.

The Diego Becerra story continues oddly, two years later when Justin Bieber came to town for a concert. Noticing the art on the walls, he asked if he could try his hand at it—with a police escort.

Sergio Elmir writes about the event on HuffPost:


….Justin Bieber performed his first ever concert in Bogota on October 29, the following night he decided to hit the streets and show Colombia his skills with a spray can. But instead of stopping him, ticketing him, even hassling him, local police gave him a personal escort. 

For several hours he painted about 40 meters of wall on 26th street in Bogota with his entourage and security in town — local police were on hand, again, not to stop him but to make sure no one bothered him while he “tagged” the wall. 

Traffic was redirected and Bieber was allowed to “paint” several crudely drawn cartoons, phrases and his own signature at his own leisure. At one point, Bieber looks to be ordering his police escort to remove the news cameras that were shooting footage of his foray into street art. If this wasn’t bratty enough, he even shows his support for fellow-pop-brat with misplaced machismo, Chris Brown, by painting the words “Free Breezy” on the wall. 

The only thing that sets these two young men apart, aside from questionable talent, is fame. The same people who killed Becerra are protecting Bieber yet both kids were doing the exact same thing. 

When artists like Banksy are blurring the line between fame and infamy in the street art world and forcing us to ask these questions — someone like Bieber takes an already controversial art form that has spent years building credibility to misfit-status. 
It goes from high-art to simple vandalism for the sake of street-cred. Nothing Bieber was doing that night, on that wall, in Colombia was for the sake of art or in the true spirit of graffiti. It was just as contrived a move as his attempts at rapping. It’s an effort to be rebellious without any risk — and to have the police there, as your backup, is as soft as it gets. 

Without even getting into the quality of the art that Bieber threw up on that wall, the real concern is his coopting of graffiti for his own personal gain. Was this his way of showing the world how “street” Bieber is? And was the open police escort their way of trying to make amends with the already marginalized graffiti community in Colombian? 
The same group of people that for years views the police as the enemy? Hard to say.
Instead of the police, Bieber could’ve easily tapped any one of the many local, talented graffiti crews in Bogota to take him out — and I’m sure they would’ve gladly taken him on a tour of all the amazing street art in Colombia. But instead, police cars, flashing lights and security guards — a whole show was put on so that Bieber could clown around with a spray can. Maybe his swag coach felt this was cooler?

When most graffiti artists around the world work in stealth, worried about the police showing up while they’re painting, Bieber seemed more concerned with locals showing up while he was throwing up his pieces. 

In fact, by the next day, local graffiti activists Mochila Ambulante did show up, with spray cans in hand, to cover up Bieber’s “graffiti.” They had no police escort and wore bandanas over their faces to cover up their identities. And while their work won’t make international headlines or cause outrage, perhaps Bieber got what he was looking for after all — attention.

The public protests that followed Bieber’s visit compelled the Municipal government of Bogotá to decriminalize all graffiti and street art. Three of the art departments in Bogotá’s 100+ universities teach street art. The community of street artists has established a consensus that everything that goes up on a wall is graffiti, so that some will not be more privileged than the others.

Some businesses ask street artists to paint their walls, and sometimes Bogotá chooses particular walls to become art exhibitions, asking artists to express themselves on them.

A Belgian artist came to Bogotá and added little men dressed in typical workers’ uniforms to some of the art.

Political graffiti also abounds in Bogota. One of my clear memories of the 1982 course I took through Bluffton College here in 1982 was seeing all the graffiti by M-19, a militant group opposed to the government that eventually became a political party. The current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, was affiliated with M-19.

The words on the black and white mural say, “I did not choose war, but I was born a warrior.” The wall of people’s faces refers to the scandal of the “false positives,” in which the Colombian army murdered ordinary people, dressed them up in guerrilla uniforms, and claimed they were guerrillas in order to receive a bounty. The wall of army officers standing in a row reads, “Who gave the order?” (to kill the civilians.). And of course Palestine is on everyone’s mind, and would appear on the walls of all the cities we would visit.

Of course we wanted to see Camilo’s street art! The picture on the left was commissioned by a bank. It was meant to be two women weaving, but it kept raining and turning the threads into a rainbow of water. Finally the bank said they like the way it looked. (By the way, I kept that wedding hair-do for more than a week.)

Camilo and his team of artists receive a commission from Bogota’s emerald traders to paint the above. Pablo Escobar and other drug lords had laundered their drug money through emerald traders, who didn’t really have the ability to refuse if they wanted to keep their families safe. As a consequence, the traders developed a reputation for being a part of the criminal class.

When Camilo’s team asked what they wanted on the wall, they assumed the traders would want something that showed their status as normal part of Colombian society. But what they wanted was the Indigenous legend of how emeralds came to be.

In the land of what is now called the Magdalena River (where Community Peacemaker Teams works, incidentally) the Muzo creator God, Are, swept over the area creating the mountains and valleys. On the shores of the sacred river, now called Minero, he formed two figures—one male (Tena) and one female (Fura)—and threw them into the river. There, they were brought to life. Once alive, Are taught Fura and Tena how to take care of the gardens that He had planted and make pottery. He gave them rules to follow including the requirement of fidelity in their husband and wife relationship. Are taught them that violating the laws he had established would lead to aging and eventual death. For a long time, Fura and Tena enjoyed their ageless lives in the beautiful land Are had prepared for them. 

Then, one day, a young man appeared. His name was Zarbi. Zarbi was looking for a flower that could cure any illness and had crossed mountains and rivers, looking high and low for the flower without success. So, he asked Fura for help, and being a compassionate soul, she began to follow him throughout the forests looking for the flower. Soon Fura became aware of her attraction to Zarbi. She was unfaithful to Tena with Zarbi and as a result immediately began to age. 

Realizing her error, she returned to Tena, who upon seeing her in her aged state realized that she had broken the law that Are had given them and would soon die. Not wanting to be left alone, Tena laid down on Fura’s knees and stabbed himself in the heart. For three days, Fura cried with the body of her husband on her lap, and her tears changed into emeralds.

Soon, Are returned to visit Fura and Tena and realized they had broken his laws. He changed the couple into large rocks. Angered, he also banished Zarbi, who in his own anger changed into a raging river in order to eternally separate Fura’s rock from Tena’s rock.

Furatena Strait on the Minero River

So sad. And given the horrors that drug cartels wreaked on Colombia, maybe that’s why the emerald traders chose this story.

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