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🦋 La dictadura

The fourth chapter of Desert Memories, "Nomads of Nitrate," offers an interesting juxtaposition, on the third and fourth days of Ariel and Angélica's journey north. May 15th, 2002 finds Dorfman in Antofagasta, meeting with a group of pampinos who were evicted six years earlier from the salitrera Pedro de Valdivia upon its condemnation. (Also present is Hernán Rivera Letelier, whom I'm glad to see -- one of my principal goals in reading this book is to find out more about Rivera Letelier.) The previous day he had visited María Elena, the last working salitrera in Chile, and dined with Eduardo Arce, the camp's manager for Soquimich S.A.

Despite the hospitable welcome... I was not entirely at ease. ...I feel uncomfortable whenever I meet members of Chile's business class, all too aware of their complicity with Pinochet's dictatorship, which in the case of Soquimich was particularly egregious, as our dictator's then son-in-law, Julio Ponce, had been one of those who acquired these salitreras from the state when they were privatized in the early 1980's in what observers consider dubious circumstances. And Eduardo Arce hints, at some point between the abalone and the sea bass -- or was it just before we were served the meringue dessert? -- when I inquire about his family, that his father had been traumatized by the experience of losing his hacienda in the South during the agrarian land reform program of President Eduardo Frei Montalva in the late sixties -- a process carried out by some of my best friends. But this is also Chile -- a country where people, at least of the elite, sit in close proximity to their former enemies and smile and chat about vintage wines and make believe the past does not really exist, that Arce is not a supporter of Pinochet and that I have not come to the North to search for the disappeared body of Freddy Taberna, not mention that Arce would lunch tomorrow at this table at the same time that I would be seated at a table in Antofagasta with the pampinos who were evicted from their homes because of decisions taken in this very room where we were having our midday meal.

posted evening of Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
➳ More posts about Desert Memories
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