Justice for Pablo Neruda is justice for Chile

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Carmen Aguirre is a writer and theatre artist whose books include Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter.

Are we ever too young to understand what we are living through?

I was five years old during the U.S.-backed coup in Chile. My parents, young leftists and university teachers, wept as we listened to president Salvador Allende’s last speech on the radio before he died defending La Moneda Palace, the seat of government.

Huddled on their bed, they explained to my four-year-old sister and I that “the president has been killed because he fought for the poor of this country.”

Days later Pablo Neruda perished in hospital. I knew of him because my parents would quote his poetry and tell stories of visiting him during their student days at La Chascona, his house in Santiago.

“Neruda died of sadness,” my father offered.

We were holding hands as we crossed the main square in Valdivia and the newspaper headlines at the kiosk told of the latest executions and who was on the most-wanted list. On that day, the front pages also announced Neruda’s passing. My father’s grip tightened around my fingers and we scurried home before curfew.

“He didn’t die of cancer, like the newspapers say,” my parents told my sister and I later that night, as we gathered around the dining room table. “He was poisoned.”

My five-year-old brain struggled with the idea that you could

die of sadness and be assassinated at the same time. But even at such a young age I knew that in post-coup Chile, if you stood with the poor, like Neruda had, chances were high that sorrow would take you or you’d be killed. And that if you were not middle or upper-class like Neruda or Allende, but, like most Chileans, poor, your fate was to be disposed of through state terrorism and/or neo-liberal austerity measures that would starve you.

Although I studied these political terms later, I was learning what they meant. I had witnessed our neighbours from across the way – a father and son who were fishermen – be tied up, thrown into a military jeep, and taken away. I heard the adults around me worry about the removal of price controls on basic goods. I was also discerning that there was resistance to all this. And that the first step was truth-telling.

When the dictatorship said that cancer had taken Neruda, many – not just my parents – denounced it as a poisoning. When it was illegal to gather in groups larger than four, almost 2,000 people went to Neruda’s funeral.

“Comrade Pablo Neruda!” they yelled out. “Present, now and forever!”

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Fifty years later, there’s scientific evidence that suggests what we always suspected is possible: Pablo Neruda was poisoned. Does this detail matter? Well, what is the difference between dying of cancer and being poisoned? To state the obvious: murder. And in the postcoup Chile context, a crime against humanity.

Memory must be positioned as a human right, an act of resistance against oblivion. Without the act of remembering what was done to Chileans during the 17-year dictatorship in the name of national security, it is impossible for a society to move toward any kind of healing, much less meaningful transformation. Since the end of the dictatorship in 1990, Chile has grappled with the tension between memory and forgetting, with the powerful very much invested in the latter; imposed amnesia grants impunity toward those who imprisoned, tortured, murdered, disappeared and exiled thousands of their fellow citizens. Forgetting is another type of violation, that of disappearing the stories that happened to countless Chileans, many of whom are still seeking justice for the crimes committed against them and their families.

It is a crucial act of resistance that Neruda’s remains were exhumed and tested and that the findings confirmed that the poet died with toxic bacteria in his body. Not as mere validation in the murder of an individual, but that this crime is emblematic of the myriad others that were committed against two main sectors of Chilean society: the poor, and the left, regardless of social class. To remember is to name, and naming must lead to justice. There can be no justice without the truth.

I was in Chile this past Sept. 4, at Plaza Dignidad, the Santiago epicentre of the 2019 social uprising, sparked by an increase in student transportation fares. There for the historic vote to replace the Pinochet-era constitution that is still in place (most of the population rejected the proposed new constitution), I interviewed a dozen people of the hundreds who were congregated at the plaza. Two young men told me about being tortured by the military police during the uprising. This was not surprising to hear; many Chileans know that torture continues to be used against protesters, most notably against the indigenous Mapuche land defenders in Wallmapu, the southern region.

The crimes continue, as does resistance. Not only is it a slap in oblivion’s face that 50 years after his death the Nobel laureate’s remains have told their truth, but a triumph in the fight for justice for all Chileans who are victims of state terrorism. Scrutiny leads to accountability.

And yes, the question I asked at the start was rhetorical. I was not too young to understand what we were living through, even though I have spent a lifetime processing it, integrating it, speaking it. So that it will not be forgotten. Like the ex-political prisoners of the National Stadium concentration camp say, a people without memory are a people without a future.

As a five-year-old I wanted to believe that a big, strong man old enough to be my grandfather could cry himself to death, no matter how devastating it was to contemplate that image. That was a more palatable demise for the poet who wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair when he was a teenager.

Companero Pablo Neruda, Presente Ahora y Siempre.

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