It was in early March 1973 that I spent my first and only night in jail, and the experience was so surreal that it still speaks eloquently to me today, fifty years later.
With a group of leftist comrades we had gone out to the night streets of our city, Santiago, to splash walls with slogans in support of President Salvador Allende, in the framework of the elections to renew the Congress.
The right-wing opposition to the popular government had proclaimed that, if they received a parliamentary super-majority, they would impeach Allende, remove him from office and put an end to his peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to create a socialist society without resorting to violence. violence.
The words we had been enthusiastically defacing on a wall near the National Stadium were appropriately, “TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY!”
Because, in effect, our democracy was under siege.
Conservative forces inside and outside Chile were conspiring to frustrate the will of the citizenry, creating chaos that would allow them to carry out an institutional coup (of the kind that, decades later, would be carried out in Brazil and Honduras) or, if not This attempt was possible, a bloodier military coup.
We never got to complete those vibrant words on that once-white wall.
The young man who was supposedly our sentry had fallen asleep and failed to warn us that a police van was heading our way.
Within moments, a burly sergeant climbed out of the armored vehicle, followed by several dauntingly burly policemen.
It was like being scared.
In my student years I had fought men like these in street battles, been choked with tear gas, and had even managed to elude a truck similar to this one that was trying to ram me while fleeing with my then-girlfriend Angelica during a protest against the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. And now my friends and I were at the mercy of those armed agents of the state.
My fears were put to rest when the sergeant informed us, in almost mild terms, that he was going to arrest us, for vandalism and for disturbing the peace of that neighborhood.
In fact, he seemed rather fatherly, like a teacher who has caught a favorite student in some mischief, as he ushered us into the cart that would transport our group to the 33rd Precinct, where, with the utmost courtesy, he locked us in an immense cell that was already full of members of other muralist brigades captured that night for making propaganda in favor of Allende and his revolutionary transformations.
Some of our new incarcerated comrades had been imprisoned before and were not surprised that, instead of being beaten, we were treated in this gentle way.
It had been like this since Allende won the presidency in 1970, ending the Carabineros practice of maiming and even killing activists.
So instead of lamenting our bruises and bruises, we spent the night discussing the prospects and problems of our young, nonviolent revolution, whether we were going too slow or too fast, and how we would deal with a military coup if it came, an argument that lasted well past dawn, when our erratic hosts offered us mugs of overly sweet hot tea and some stale bread, then released us with a mere verbal warning: not to further deface public and private property. .
As for the word DEMOCRACY that we had been writing with such enthusiasm, it would remain sad, incomplete, interrupted.
Like our own democracy.
Despite the dire economic situation caused by the US blockade of international aid (Nixon had ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream”), Allende's coalition received enough votes—44.23%—to avoid impeachment.
Six months later, on September 11, 1973, the presidential palace was bombed, Allende was dead, and the militants who spent the night in that cell that night, and hundreds of thousands more, were fleeing for their lives in a country where the democracy we had wanted to defend gave way to the seventeenth anniversary of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
And the 33rd Police Station?
What had been a utopian space during that strange and luminous night, a place where the imprisoned could discuss the fraternal future without fear, became another center of terror, one of many.
I have often wondered how many prisoners were humiliated within those walls, how often electricity was applied to their genitals, whether Allende supporters passed through there and ended up in the nearby National Stadium where many were tortured and executed in the days after the attack. bang.
I often recalled those singular hours in that Police Station in the days that followed the fall of Allende and also when, 10 years later, I returned from exile.
By the way, upon returning to a rebellious Chile, I suffered various forms of repression: beatings by soldiers in the street, tear gas ingested during protests against the Pinochet regime, and being deported from Chile for my "subversive" activities. .. but I never spent another night in a jail.
It was natural, then, that the memory of those few hours of serenity in that cell overflowing with hopeful militants and their dreams of a future of liberation would remain circling me, impossible to forget that moment that seemed unrepeatable.
Since, when democracy was restored in Chile in 1990, the Police Stations continued to be, especially for the young and the poor, zones of fear and injustice.
And the worst was yet to come: during the outbreak, the massive protests that shook Chile to the core in 2019, there were an enormous amount of human rights violations by the police.
Eyes blinded, women raped, demonstrators run over by police vans, thousands of innocents beaten, an arsenal of assaults that perpetuated the darkest days of the dictatorship.
Throughout those devastating experiences, I clung to that spectral night of 1973 as a potential alternative to what our contemporary humanity was experiencing, offering me a glimmer of hope in increasingly cruel times, the certainty and promise that there are other ways. of behavior and relationships between law enforcement officers and the people they are supposed to serve.
That brief interlude when police brutality miraculously disappeared, replaced by civil treatment in the dark and excessively sweet tea in the morning, lingered in my mind as a model to which the entire world should aspire.
The whole world, I insist, because this is not just a story about distant Chile.
Day after day after day we witness violence against unarmed citizens, street after street, city after city,
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that overthrew Allende, a man who did not want to repress his people, a leader who issued directives that saved me and my friends and many others so that we could give ourselves generously to the future.
What hurts me the most is the terrible waste of resources, talent and achievements when the police, instead of acting as they did that night in Chile, unleash their fury against their compatriots, it hurts me that so many wonderful futures are extinguished.
What my experience of fifty years ago continues to whisper to me fiercely and softly, like a ghost that won't let go, is that it doesn't have to be that way.
Ariel Dorfman is the author of
Death and the Maiden
and of a forthcoming novel,
Allende and the Suicide Museum
, which investigates the death of Salvador Allende.