Carmen Aguirre - Gut Instincts

 

 

I was born in Chile and raised in Canada. In 1986, when I was 18 years old, I went back to South America for four years to join the underground Chilean Resistance Movement against the Pinochet dictatorship. [audience applause] 

 

Thank you. Pinochet was an ultra-right winger who installed a fascist regime and a neoliberal economy with all the austerity measures that come with it. My Resistance activities involved running a safe house in a small Argentinian city that bordered Chile. My husband and I would hide Resistance members in our house, and we would deliver goods into Chile on buses and in small planes that we had learned to fly. 

 

The dreaded secret police was everywhere, and they operated through a system referred to as Plan Condor, in which the secret police forces of various South American nations worked together to capture Resistance members. 180 Chilean Resistance members had disappeared in Argentina. 

 

I spent those four years in a state of absolute terror. Many of my fellow Resistance members refer to our generation as the Generation of Terror, because many of us were not arrested, not tortured, not murdered, but the paranoia was intense to the point where you really started to think, am I making this up? I've got to be making this up. Living under a dictatorship will fuck with your brain that way. Sure, Big Brother is always watching you, but is he really? If he was really always watching me, wouldn't I be six feet under by now, what with all my underground illicit activity? 

 

It was in the late 1980s that we got a memo. Now, memos came in the form of a roll of film delivered to a post office box that you had rented under an assumed identity. You would take the roll of film home and develop it yourself in this dark room at the back of your closet, a secret dark room. The photographs were of documents in tiny print that you had to study with a magnifying glass and then promptly burn and flush. This particular memo was quite disturbing, because it told us to watch our thoughts, to watch our paranoia. 

 

What had just happened was that an elder Resistance member had just turned himself in to the secret police. He had been walking through downtown Santiago with a briefcase full of top-secret documents with meeting points, contacts, addresses, tactics, strategies. He had become convinced that he was being followed and that an ambush was imminent. He ended up turning himself in to the militarized police, briefcase and all. The sad part is that he was not being followed. But 17 years in the underground, plus the disappearance of his children, had finally broken him. He gave himself away and many others whose details were in that briefcase. 

 

I thought back to a few years earlier, 1986, when I got my first paycheck teaching English as a foreign language, which was my façade. Also, the Chilean Resistance was all consuming, but it didn't pay. [audience laughter] Gleeful that we could finally eat something other than crackers and cheese, my husband and I filled our shopping cart to the brim with all kinds of delicacies. Dulce de leche, rosehip jam, cans of tomato sauce, packages of spaghetti, blocks of cheese. 

 

I looked up from reading the ingredients on a package of breaded soya cutlets. When my eyes met the steady gaze of a middle-aged man in a beige polyester pinstriped suit hanging onto an empty shopping cart halfway down the aisle, he half smiled at me. My knees buckled. Every hair on my body stood on end. I went numb with fear. He was one of them, one of the dreaded secret police. How did I know this? Gut instinct. I just knew. I whispered to my husband. We continued slowly working up our way, up and down the aisles, acting normal, filling our shopping cart as we've been trained to do by our superiors over a two-year training period. The man followed, always keeping half an aisle between us. 

 

Our minds scrambled. It was noon on a Saturday, and the supermarket was packed. We looked outside and amongst the pedestrians and the traffic, we saw an idling Peugeot 504 at the entrance with three men inside it. The car had two antennae, one in the front, one in the back. A secret police car. This was it. We were fucked. 

 

But on our way into the supermarket, we had surveyed our surroundings as per our training, and we noticed that right next door there was a telephone company with mirrored windows, the kind where you can look out but people cannot look in. We slowly made our way to one of the checkout counters. The man lined up just down the way. We loaded all our groceries onto the conveyor belt. When it was our turn to pay, we slipped out quickly instead, lost ourselves in the crowd at the entrance and ducked right into the telephone company. 

 

A moment later, the man came running out, looking everywhere. His hand reached into his jacket pocket for his gun. He ended up diving into the waiting car and they took off at lightning speed while we watched from inside the telephone company. I was so scared that my spirit left my body and clung to a corner of the ceiling. I was hollow with fear. We spent the rest of the afternoon zigzagging around the city, taking different buses, trying to lose the possible tail, which we did. 

 

In 1990, the dictatorship ended, although Pinochet's neoliberal economy remains intact in Chile. We saw this as a huge loss. The Resistance disbanded. I ended up getting divorced and moving back to Canada. But the question always remained, what had I imagined? What was real? 

 

25 years later, I was writing a memoir about these experiences. So, I went back to Buenos Aires to ask my ex-husband a few questions. We met at a pasta restaurant. And over a plate of gnocchi, I asked him if he remembered the supermarket inside incident. He said he didn't. My heart sank. Had I invented this scenario and so many others like it? Was I just like the man with the briefcase? I went into great detail about the supermarket incident, and he said he had no idea what I was talking about. I was confused. He remembered everything else, everything that had gone down, everything that we had done. He just remembered no incident of ever being followed. I was ashamed. We said goodbye. 

 

A few days later, I saw a photograph in the newspaper. It was a picture of the man from the supermarket. 25 years had passed, but I knew it was him. I read the story. The man in the photograph was a Chilean secret police operative operating in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. He had just been stabbed to death by his 21-year-old gay lover. It was a crime of passion. When the Argentinian police went to his apartment, the scene of the crime, they found a stack of boxes at the back of his closet. Inside these boxes were files with all the details of his secret police activities, including names of Chilean Resistance members he had followed, the ones he had tortured and murdered. Still, how could I be sure [chuckles] that this was the man from the supermarket? How could I recognize a face a quarter of a century later? 

 

I went back to Canada. And a few months later a fellow Chilean Resistance member sent me an email with the subject title, This will interest you. [audience laughter] Somebody had taken it upon themselves to transcribe the contents of the files. And now, the document was being sent to those of us who had lived in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. I pored through this document, which was literally hundreds of pages long. 

 

I finally came upon a short paragraph describing a following, “In 1986, in a supermarket in the Argentinian city that we had lived in.” It described, “A young couple in their late teens. The girl was a Chilean exile raised in Canada, back in Argentina to join the Resistance. The boy was an Argentinian. Their trail had been lost that day.” The paragraph said what the intention had been to pick up this couple, throw them in the back of the car, torture them to get as much information out of them as possible, then murder them and dispose of their bodies. 

 

I read this paragraph with my hand over my mouth, horror seizing me, but also a sense of relief. Relief that I was not crazy, that I could trust my instinct, my memory, my life. Many of my fellow Resistance members have died young from all the stress, from the terror, the paranoia and from not having the answers to so many questions. And one of the things that has helped save me is the gift of being able to witness the evidence of my own experience to reclaim it, to own it and to speak it. Thank you.