From SA to Chile, the struggle continues
JORGE Pesce Aguirre looks out at the snow-capped Andes Mountains. His gaze frozen in a traumatic past – a time deeply etched in the national psyche of Chile. His son, Jorge, his namesake, and a professional translator, translates his father’s life journey – two generations reliving painful memories in a recent interview with me in Santiago.
Chileans commemorated the 44th anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup on September 11, 1973, supported by the CIA. Jorge was then a 17-year-old high school activist and president of the Student’s Centre. He was also a member of the radical Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a far-left communist and guerrilla organisation. He received brief military training from MIR.
Following the coup, the security police and army conducted a reign of terror against MIR and other political organisations. Thousands of activists and civilians were detained, disappeared or killed. The repressive climate was difficult for armed resistance.
In the second half of the 1970s, Jorge was involved in social mobilisation at a university, and was close to the Christian Left Party of Chile (IC) that promoted liberation theology.
This affiliation led him to understand the linkages between Christian values and social struggle.
The university’s Faculty of Education was known as the liberated space. The faculty and the Student Union openly defied the military regime; several students were arrested. Jorge was among them, in his mid-20s and a final year university student. It was early 1981.
He was detained at Borgo o, the headquarters of the Santiago security police, a notorious detention and torture centre. The vicious security police accused him of MIR membership. Brutalised by his interrogators, Jorge stood firm, denying any knowledge of MIR members.
His insolence infuriated his torturers. He was stripped naked. Wet towels were placed on him and electric shocks applied to his body. He was placed naked on an iron grill mattress and given electric shock treatment that convulsed his entire body. Refusing to co-operate, his head was sunk into a bucket of water, asphyxiating him. His body was burnt with cigarette ends. He still suffers from dental problems due to the electric shocks.
A huge policeman pointed a loaded gun at his head, questioning him about the Catholic priests that he worked closely with in Santiago’s slums. Together, they mobilised slum dwellers through political education and union training. The police threatened the lives of his wife, Maria Angelica Lecaros Hernandez and their five-year old son, Jorge, while pulling the trigger twice.
On another occasion, in a dark cell, frustrated by his defiance, the policeman kicked Jorge’s back. His spine was dislocated; an injury that continues to afflict him.
Jorge pauses his narration, lighting another cigarette, his distant gaze returning to the Andean snow caps. I follow Jorge’s gaze towards the Andes, disturbed by the images of torture and pain.
I travel back in time across the Atlantic to the Maluti Mountains on the border of South Africa and the Kingdom of Lesotho.
It’s 1986. I’m in Maluti, a small rural town in the apartheid homeland of Transkei. The image of a security policeman pointing a sub-machine gun at my head jolts me – after days of endless interrogation. I am in my mid-20s, a high school teacher and an African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) soldier, held in solitary confinement for four weeks. Jorge resumes his story. His university and Catholic Church comrades have publicly broadcast his disappearance. After his release, the military junta exiled (“redagalo”) him to the little town of Diego de Almagro, 900km north of the capital city in the desert.
Here, he was to remain incommunicado for three months, reporting twice daily to the local police. His face was broadcast on national TV as a dangerous communist and a terrorist.
Undeterred, Jorge connected with the local church and formed a group, starting a students’ support centre, a library and a primary health care centre. Infuriated by his actions, the junta planned to exile him elsewhere. The church provided him legal and medical support to contest further banishment, based on medical grounds owing to his serious back injury. His appeal was successful.
On his return to Santiago, life was difficult. He received death threats and his family was in danger. A strangled cat was placed in their garden. That’s when he went deeply underground, resurfacing when it was safe. The strain on his family was tremendous. Maria was unaware of his underground activities before his arrest.
In 1982, like thousands of Chileans since the coup, to avoid arrest Jorge, Maria and little Jorge were forced into exile in Spain. Here Jorge studied journalism and a higher degree in sociology, while Maria pursued social work studies and specialised in mental health.
Jorge and his family returned home in 1987 and started the tough task of re-integrating. The military regime had weakened and Pinochet lost the 1988 referendum seeking to extend military rule.
Democracy returned to Chile – a time of healing and uncovering the truth. On his return, Jorge resumed his work at the Chile Human Rights Commission set up in 1978 by lawyers, medical doctors and intellectuals.
He was a founding member and had focused on youth issues. He systematically researched human rights abuses during the military regime across the country. His team unearthed mass graves of the “disappeared” and listened to survivors’ horrific stories – like his own. Later, the Chile National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation was set up and investigated the testimonies he collected.
Jorge reminisces on the personal, family and social cost of his activism: “The most permanent scars are not physical, it’s emotional. It’s not that I was tortured, but that I had to live a divided life. I lost friends, comrades. I stopped studying. The toll on my family was great, living in fear of the consequences of my actions on them. Only in Spain, I started to have a normal family life, I became a father figure to my son. Before I had no focus on family.”
Today, he is dissatisfied and finds it difficult to live in the new Chile: “I had many expectations with the change in power and democracy in the 1990s. Politics is no longer important to me because the political class proved unable to do what they were supposed to.
“Pinochet’s constitution was accepted. Socio-cultural changes are happening, but people are driven by superficial, selfish, pretentious and consumerist lifestyles.”
He is encouraged by young people in Chile: “They occupy public space and do what they want to do spontaneously, for example artistic expressions like dancing or theatre, and taking up issues of indigenous people, migrants and women’s rights. This creates its own dynamism; a new form of underground movement.”
As an education lecturer at a local university, he finds solace in his students’ deep awareness of current realities. He is inspired by Nelson Mandela’s view that the most revolutionary thing you can do is to educate people; it’s the basis of everything.
As I bid farewell to both Jorges, I am in awe of the universal and unconquerable power of the human spirit. I am reminded of the fighting spirit of South African liberation struggle activists such as Ahmed Timol, Steve Biko, Neil Aggett, Imam Abdullah Haron and Ashley Kriel – detained, tortured and killed.
This creates its own dynamism; a new form of underground movement.