Arturo Fontaine - La Vida Doble

I knew, I had been in their dungeons. Instead of heroes, our destiny was to be misguided extremists half-invented by the military, idealists who inspired pity. The vanguard of combatants that was to inaugurate a new world would become a herd of victims; the spear point of warriors and heroes would turn into a flock of sacrificial lambs. And after all, maybe it wasn’t power that we wanted but rather to oppose all power — maybe we wouldn’t have known how to do anything with power except lose it. And that was, perhaps, what we wanted: to be the lambs of a great sacrifice and for its memory to remain on the altar of history so that others who came after us would identify with us and resurrect us.

And when President Salvador Allende fired the AK — the one Fidel gave him — into his own mouth, what if he had wanted precisely to avoid our sacrifice, to sacrifice himself for all of us? A Christ, then, revolutionary, Masonic, then, and atheist, a disciple of “historical materialism”? Do you think I’m off base, that I’m being disrespectful, that I’m moving away from the stubborn and inexorable facts? Allow me some imprecision, some imaginative improvisation, which can be more illuminating than the fetishism of facts. Sometimes interpretation is better than the data. For better or worse, you’ve told me you want to get a novel out of this. Or have you been convinced it’s better if you don’t? In any case, there’s another hypothesis, one that sticks closer to actual history. You know, he sent a message to Miguel Enríquez, the head of MIR, the leader of those who thought armed struggle was inevitable and were preparing for it. He sent it just moments before he died. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. Miguel’s turn, he meant, and the turn of all those who thought the way he did.

Nevertheless, in the end victory belongs to the crucified one, and the opiate of his church of poor souls bereft on the earth. A taboo against armed struggle has been instituted. The incapacity for revenge is called lack of desire for revenge. And meanwhile, in the vale of tears, the rich hoard more and more treasure. And, well, for the lambs to be upset at the great predatory birds is no strange thing. Of course they know, poor little rich boys, that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Oh, how scary! They had taught us that power came from the mouth of a gun . . In a few years, weakness was falsified into something of merit and the sanctimonious were asking, as you are, with widened eyes: But what war, what revolution, what insurrection are you talking about, pray tell? We were caught up in the vengeance of the powerless , their imaginary vengeance.

The police report informed of an “armed confrontation” in which “two extremists and one officer of the intelligence service were gunned down.” Two others “were shot and injured, and are recuperating in the Military Hospital.” The place was cordoned off for some forty minutes, after which not a drop of blood was left on the ground. The broken windows of the currency exchange and the offices on the corner of Ahumada were replaced that same afternoon. When they took the cordon down, office workers flooded back in. From the moment when a thin wire fell around Samuel’s neck and strangled him until I was taken prisoner, four and a half minutes went by. That was what our lookouts estimated. According to more experienced combatants the encounter had been a long one. People don’t realize: normally a shootout in an urban area doesn’t last even two minutes.

And there was neither war nor guerrillas, you say now; there was nothing, so many say today. Just a few isolated acts of sabotage and erratic attacks. Insignificant factions that were, moreover, ineffective. And that’s what you’ve been told and what you’ve read, I know. There was nothing, you repeat, that could pose a threat to the terror of the established order. So the sacrifice of our comrades was in vain.

And how do you want me to answer, from my bed in this Ersta home? What would the Spartan have thrown back in your face? What did the reports say back then? I have one here that I saved. I have it at hand because I knew you were going to ask me that. I want to answer you with the facts. I want to be meticulous with you about this. Ha! As you can see, I prepared for this interview. Well, as I told you, you can have five hours. You can take notes, if you want. I have a raspberry juice for you. I like how they make it here, it’s natural, they don’t add sugar or anything. Not bad, right? So listen, while you sip your raspberry juice:

“The armed conflict is intensifying: in the past months there have been twelve attacks on high-voltage towers and electrical substations belonging to Endesa in Talca, Osorno, Quilpué, Renca, La Reina, Río Negro, Santiago, Concepción, and Valparaíso, which each time left a large part of the surrounding territory in darkness for some six to eight hours; nine explosions on the rail lines in Osorno, Chiguayante, Río Negro, Concepción, Valparaíso, and San Miguel; fourteen attacks with explosives or incendiary bombs on municipal grounds in San Miguel, Quinta Normal, Quilicura, Pudahuel; five bank expropriations, three of them simultaneous, with the goal of collecting funds for revolutionary activities; attacks with incendiary bombs on supermarkets in Pudahuel and Conchalí; two explosives in gas valves in front of factories in Santiago; Radio Revolución blocked the signal of the national channel, interrupting transmission of the Festival of Viña del Mar to nine countries, and for four minutes the rebel, antidictatorial voice reached millions of Chileans who were listening to that channel; ambush and machine-gunning of a police patrol in Pudahuel; the resistance assaulted and set fire to a bus belonging to police; seven confrontations with agents of the repression in which the capture of members of the militia was attempted by raiding their houses, and in several of these instances the combatants gave their lives rather than fall prisoner; a combat group met for two hours with the people in the village of La Mora and explained to them that in order to overthrow the tyrant there is no other choice than to take up arms. . It was suggested to them that one of the current tasks is to unmask the reformists and social democrats. Just as with Somoza in Nicaragua or the Shah in Iran, the wheeler-dealers are doomed to fail. Electoral conjuring entails collaboration in the subordination of class, and dialogue leads to capitulation. . ”

That’s what the reports that reached us were like. I could tell you about some spectacular missions of unquestionable veracity; the execution of General Urzúa, the mayor of Santiago, for example, or of Colonel Vergara, head of the Military Intelligence School, and the failed guerrilla war in Neltume, all missions that MIR carried out. And, later, the tyrannicide attempted by the Patriotic Front on the road to Melocotón: it failed by a hair. And, already in the phony democracy that came later, they kidnapped the son of the owner of the newspaper El Mercurio (they had previously kidnapped Colonel Carreño and the Cruzat boy, son of another magnate); then there were the executions of “Wally,” the head asesino during the darkest years of the dictatorship, of General Leigh, one of the coup leaders — he lived, miraculously, but lost an eye — and of Senator Guzmán, the right-wing leader who was murdered coming out of the Catholic University. And there are more. Like when several combatants escaped from Chile’s highest security prison, dodging bullets as they were raised up in a basket hanging from a helicopter. .

It’s true: we took some hits, even some hard ones that were possibly devastating. The Spartan took it especially hard when Arturo Vilavella, head of MIR’s military apparatus, died in combat. The Spartan really admired him. Also, of course, when the Front’s arsenal was discovered hidden away in the caves at Carrizal Bajo.