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June
7, 2003
An Interview with Isabel Allende
"What Are
People Waiting For?"
By LAURA FLANDERS
Editors' Note: Chilean author Isabel Allende has lived through
a dictatorship once and she's not about to sit by and watch democracy
stolen a second time.
In her latest memoir, My
Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey through Chile,
she explores her recollections of her homeland, the lessons of
its history, and her understanding of what it means to be Chilean,
and now, an American.
Allende was interviewed by Laura Flanders
and by the audience of Working Assets Radio, a call-in program
heard Monday-Friday on KALW-91.7 fm in San Francisco and on www.workingassetsradio.com.
The interview took place on May 29, 2003.
LF: The coup of September 11, 1973 in
Chile, which overthrew your cousin Salvador Allende, and the
attacks on the same date in the United States. You say these
two September 11ths, separated by almost thirty years have come
to make all the difference in your life and that the attacks
on the United States shifted your relationship both to Chile
and to this country your home, now, for many years. Can you explain?
IA: Well. On a Tuesday, September 11,
1973, we had a military coup in Chile. It was a terrorist attack
on a democracy sponsored by the CIA. Many years later, we had
a terrorist attack on this democracy, on the United States, where
I am living. I think that in my mind, both events have a great
meaning because in the first one, I lost my country. I had to
leave, and I lived in exile for many, many years. And the second
event made me feel I belonged -- I gained a country. And the
feeling came for the first time; I felt that I could relate to
the vulnerability that people were feeling.
When I came to the United States 16 years
ago, one of the things that I told my husband was that this was
a very arrogant country. It was a sort of childish optimism and
childish arrogance that, nothing could happen here, that everybody
was safe and we would prosper indefinitely and that everything
would always be better and better. And that's not how life is
in the rest of the world. So I always felt very alien. And then,
for the first time, on September 11, 2001, I think that people
realized how life is for the rest of the world and I could relate
to that.
LF: Now, when you go to Chile in your
writings here in the latest book, My Invented Country, the majority
of the book is about the pre-1973 period, in which, as you describe
it, Chileans, certainly of the class to which you belonged, had
some of the same denial, at least as you describe it. You say:
"We Chileans had no idea what a military coup entailed,
because we had a long and solid democratic tradition." You
write: "No, that would never happen to us, we proclaimed,
[pointing at "Banana Republics" elsewhere] because
in Chile even the soldiers believed in Democracy. No one would
dare violate our constitution."
IA: Well, it was violated. In 24 hours,
everything changed. And it can happen anywhere. It happened in
Italy in Spain in Germany, it has happened everywhere in world.
So no one is immune to something like that. And I think that
it is important to remember that. That we only appreciate what
we have when we lose it. And that can happen with health or that
can happen with democracy. And it did happen that way in Chile.
LF: Were you aware, immediately, of the
change that had just happened in your life?
IA: No. It was very sudden. It happened
in a day, but we were not aware because there was censorship.
All the media was censored and there was now news, only rumors.
Also, because we had this long tradition in democracy, we thought
that the soldiers would go back to their barracks in a week and
they would call elections again. We never - I think that not
even the military - expected it to last 17 years and have the
brutal characteristics that id had. It was a surprise.
LF: Now, many of the Allende family -
the closer family, perhaps, left, right after the coup. I think
you said before; there was a plane sent, or a boat from Mexico
on which people were able to leave. You didn't. You stayed, you
continued to do work of a kind a*| at what point did you realize
you have to get out and you went to Venezuela?
IA: I think it was like a year later.
I realized a*| slowly I realized that I had been involved in
things that were a*| that you could lose your life for - like
hiding people and smuggling information out of the country and
trying to put people in embassies to find asylum and that sort
of thing. I got more and more scared. I felt that the circle
of repression was closing around my neck and there was a point
at which I just couldn't take it anymore. There were several
signs that I was in a "black list." All this was, as
I have said before, just rumors. Nothing was ever confirmed.
The rules changed all the time. The repression became more and
more efficient, more effective. And that happened rapidly, but
in stages.
You know, it is something very strange:
You learn to live with things. For example, something is taken
away, like let's say, the freedom of the press or a*| yeah, let's
say that you're telephones are tapped so you say "Okay,
I can live with that" and then the next day something else,
and then you say, "Okay, I will have to live with that too,"
and so forth. And then after a few months, you realize that you
have lost everything. But, you got sort of used to it. And then
there's a point when you're talking torture at breakfast time
with you kids. And all of a sudden you have this epiphany or
this revelation in which you realize what kind of life you are
having a*| and then there is a point where I left.
LF: Ultimately, Pinochet was tripped
up on his own legal shenanigans, leaving open the cases of the
many, many, many disappeared and thus leaving the legal case
open enough to prosecute. When he was indicted, there was an
excitement throughout Latin America in particular, that finally,
justice would be served - that finally, there would be an end
of this culture of impunity. What's happened to that feeling
now?
AI: Well, I think we know that there
is impunity, but there is impunity in the world. Look at the
horrible things that other people have done - the United States
to begin with - and there is impunity. People who should have
been punished for their crimes have not. And people who have
not committed crimes go to the electric chair. So the world is
a very unjust, unfair place and we have to live with that. Historically,
there is impunity for most crimes.
LF: Do you think Americans generally
have the sense of there being a "Culture of Impunity"
right here?
IA: No. Not at all. I think that we have,
in the United States, that we are the best country in the world,
that we have the best democracy, that justice is always served,
that the bad guys always pay, that the good guys are always rewarded,
etc. The Hollywood thing.
But when we analyze our history and our
country, we realize that a lot of things go wrong, very wrong.
LF: You comment about 9/11 that in a
sense it gave you a different mission, a new mission a*| how
would you describe the difference?
IA: When I came to this country, I came
because I fell in love or in lust with a guy. I was not following
the American Dream. I did not know that the American Dream existed,
and I came here with the idea that I would get this guy out of
my system in a week and I would go back. And that was 16 years
ago, he's still in my system, and I have become American.
I love this country and I want to change
the things that I don't like, and I think that I belong and I
have a mission. My mission is to be a bridge between two cultures.
I speak English and Spanish. I write
in Spanish, my books are published in English. I find myself
with a microphone, addressing audiences all the time. So, I am
in a position to tell them the things that I see abroad and people
don't know here. They're misinformed or they don't care, because
they don't know, really, what's happening.
LF: What is the top of your list of things
to tell?
IA: Peace. Peace is the top of the list,
because we think that we can go into another country and invade
another country and we have the right to do so. And we invent
all kinds of excuses to do it and now are inventing excuses to
invade Iran or Syria or whatever. And that is not something we
can do w/ impunity. Sooner or later, we pay for that. And I think
that people should know that.
CALLER: Keith in Fairfax - Will the US
apologize?
IA: No, the United States will not apologize
and that's not the point. The point is that we don't commit the
same thing again and again. Because, the same thing was done
in Nicaragua, in Guatemala. We supported the Contras, we supported
Noriega in Panama. We have supported all the worst dictatorships
in all of Latin America. We have destroyed democratic governments
to install tyrants - the kind of government that we will never
tolerate in this country.
So, that is what needs to be changed.
Have a vision of the world. When September 11 happened, people
asked for the first time the question, "Why do they hate
us?"
They had never asked the question before,
and they were not even aware of what was going on abroad.
The world starts to exist, for Americans,
when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden,
Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place.
And it exists for three weeks and then it disappears into thin
air. And then Iraq pops up, and then we forget about Iraq again
and now we focus on something else. Our span of attention is
really short.
CALLER: David, talking about The House
of the Spirits and how the end upset him [reconciliation] -
IA: The intention of the ending was reconciliation.
It says very clearly in the book: not everybody who needs to
be punished will be punished. And it says that we have to get
over a*| we cannot pay back with violence. We have to a*| Never
forget, but forgive. And keep on with our lives. And I think
that that has happened in Chile.
That ending of the book was really attacked
everywhere when the book came out. And time has proved that that
was the only way we could go on and recover democracy. We had
to let go. And we had to let go of the idea a*| sometimes even
of the idea of justice just to keep on looking at the future.
You know, this was thirty years ago.
I've met innumerable people who were victims of the dictatorship.
I never have met anybody who says: "I want to rape the rapist,
I want to torture the torturer, I want to kill the murderer.
Never. People don't want to do that because they're different,
they're better. They just want the truth to be known, the dead
to be honored, and to go on w/ their lives.
LF: You clearly don't forget, do you
forgive the United States for what they did in Chile?
IA: The United States as a country didn't
even know what was going on in Chile. It was the government.
And you cannot blame the population of the United States for
what Kissinger and Nixon did a*| or the CIA. The same way that
you cannot blame the United States today for what's going on
in Iraq. Because, most people don't even know, what we see on
TV is a video game. We don't really know what's going on in there.
Now, we have the obligation as educated people to get the information,
but not everybody does that.
LF: The story that has grabbed my attention
this week is the news from Guantanamo Bay, where we're being
told that US officials are essentially planning to turn the place
into a death camp - with its own death row, it's own execution
chamber. We've already been told that this is a place where 680
detainees can be kept without trial, there will be tribunals
without juries and appeals. Now there is talk of even a death
sentence being imposed. At what point do we say, here in the
United States, do you, with your experience in Chile say: this
is just too familiar? We must call this by its name, and what
is it?
IA: Well, this is what happened in Germany,
with the Nazis. Slowly but surely, the concentration camps and
the death camps appeared all over the country and in other countries
too. And people thought that they could stand it. Okay, they
could just tolerate it because it didn't affect their personal
lives.
We have to stop it. We have to stop it
now, before it gets out of hand. This government is doing things
that are not allowed in our constitution. So we have to react.
What are people waiting for God's sake?
Laura Flanders
is the host of Working Assets Radio, your open line to the newsmakers
of tomorrow and today. Join a live, caller-driven conversation,
Monday-Friday, 10-11 am PST at Working Assets Radio and on KALW,
91.7 fm, in San Francisco. She can be reached at: lfsrfc@yahoo.com
Today's
Features
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
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