Grim at Grimaldi

I hate to be a downer, but let me just start this off by saying that this post will be quite different from the rest because rather than being about another awesome adventure, it’s about when I went to Villa Grimaldi, one of the main detention and torture sites in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, and the General Cemetery in Santiago. Basically this is going to be serious and I don’t blame you for skipping it, but it is pretty eye opening. I know that most people who read this don’t know about Pinochet so first I’ll just give a little background information.

Mr. Matta showing us the gate to Villa Grimaldi

Augusto Pinochet was the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean army in 1973, which was the year that he led a coup to overthrow Salvador Allende [the socialist president of Chile at the time]. He was then the dictator of the country from 1973 to 1990 [yes, it was extremely recent]. During that time Pinochet created a secret police force named the DINA who would remove citizens from society deemed a threat to the government. About 5,000 were brought through the gates of Villa Grimaldi, located where the outskirts of Santiago used to be, and 240 of those became part of the “desaparecidos” [disappeared] people of Chile from the dictatorship.

Half of the students from my study abroad program and I met with a man named Pedro Matta last Friday to learn about Villa Grimaldi before touring it. For about an hour and a half he explained the function of each building on the property and what tortures occurred there. It wasn’t until later when we were standing in the complex while he told us that the only way to survive such horrors like that is to force yourself to sleep at night that we realized he was one of the people who had been tortured there. He described how he had to mentally block out the screams of other prisoners, the stench of the feces and urine in the cells, everything, just to be able to sleep so that he would have enough energy to endure whatever the next day held.

A mosaic sculpture on the ground--the cobblestones and tiles were
the only things the prisoners could see under their blindfolds

Villa Grimaldi wasn’t what I was expecting because Mr. Matta hadn’t told us that Pinochet’s government had destroyed all of the buildings in order to hide the memory of what had happened there. One of the buildings, the tower, has been rebuilt though and where the others once stood now there is a mosaic plaque on the ground. The rose garden, where female prisoners were raped, is also still there, but now each rose is in memory of a woman who was violated.

A couple other things that Mr. Matta told us while guiding us through Villa Grimaldi was that he was in college to become a lawyer when he was captured by the DINA and when he was released he was basically like a zombie. I can't even begin to imagine trying to recuperate from such a traumatizing experience like what he endured. He was tortured for 13 months and after being released he left his family and took asylum in the United States and lived there for 15 years before returning to Chile. 


I don’t really want to go through and describe all of the tortures because it honestly makes me nauseous and depressed, but if you’re interested here is a website with everything that he informed us:

http://thelegacyproject.com/acmatta.html

Example of one of the mosaics demonstrating where a building was

The list of prisoners; at the top it reads "The fogotten is full of memory"

Allende's grave

The other place that we went to on Friday after Villa Grimaldi was the General Cemetery. That place blew. my. mind. You see, Santiago is a VERY classist society—where you live, how much money you have, and how well you dress determine what kind of service you receive and how you are treated. As you can imagine, this same idea is reflected in the tombs at the cemetery. We started out at the front entrance, which is incredibly beautiful, and gawked at the enormous monuments build for each individual family. The upper class section of the cemetery reminded me a lot of the one in Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We stopped by Allende’s grave and Mr. Matta briefly tried to explain to us everything that Allende had represented to Chile. He was the first democratically elected socialist president and was the source of hope for so many Chileans who didn’t belong in the middle or upper classes. He also told us through tears about the education problem in this country and the disadvantages of the lower class. Even though he came from the upper middle class, he discovered that his privileged upbringing gave him a huge advantage in higher education and therefore he fights for the right of education for everyone. But I’m going to write a post about education and the protests here another time.

Here's an example of a giant, upper class tomb

The tomb for the Chilean soccer team I started following: Colo Colo!

The cemetery is so large that they have cart vendors selling snacks and drinks inside

A memorial at the cemetery for the desaparecidos [people who 'disappeared'] during the Pinochet dictatorship

As we continued through the cemetery we noticed the tombs became smaller until they turned just to headstones and then from granite headstones to white metal crosses and from white to rust. It seemed like all you could see for miles were dirt fields of dried weeds and rusted, deteriorating metal crosses. It was incredibly moving. There are about 5 million people buried there, which is about the same number that are alive in Santiago today. Since they have run out of room in the cemetery they have begun a new process called “reductions” where they remove the corpses after 20 years and put the remaining pieces of bone in smaller boxes and then replace the spot with a newly deceased person. However, the problem with the poorest section of cemetery is that the majority of the spaces are leased because the families cannot afford to permanently keep their loved ones buried. If the payment is not met, then the deceased is removed and cremated and the spot is given to someone else.

Even though Friday was a really dense day and afterwards I felt emotionally and mentally exhausted, it was definitely a very worthwile experience. Meeting Mr. Matta and knowing everything that he has survived is of inexplicable value to me. I can't believe that he is able to go back to the place where all those horrific things happened to him and share it with complete strangers. He is such a gentle, kind man and very inspiring. 


Obviously, I learned a lot from Mr. Matta, Villa Grimaldi, and the cemetery, but to end on a little bit of a funny note, another thing I learned is that thanks to the huge cemetery, if there is a zombie apocalypse then I am in serious trouble.