Mirrors (80 page)

His savings account was not negligible either by the time he was forced to resign, after more than thirty years of service to his country. Deep pockets: Abdurrahman Wahid, his successor as president, estimated Suharto’s personal fortune to be equal to everything Indonesia owed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

We know he loved Switzerland and enjoyed walking along the streets of Zurich and Geneva, but he never managed to recall precisely where he had left his money.

In the year 2000, a medical team examined General Suharto and declared him physically and mentally unfit to stand trial.

ANOTHER CASE OF AMNESIA

A medical report ruled that General Augusto Pinochet was suffering from senile dementia.

Incapable of judgment, he could not be judged.

Pinochet maneuvered past three hundred criminal charges without losing his cool, and died without ever doing time. Chile’s reborn democracy, meanwhile, was saddled with paying his debts and forgetting his crimes. He joined in the official amnesia.

He had killed, he had tortured, but he said:

“It wasn’t me. Besides, I don’t remember. And if I do remember, it wasn’t me.”

In the international language of soccer, bad teams are still called “Pinochets” because they fill stadiums in order to torture people, but the general does not lack admirers. Santiago’s September 11 Avenue was christened, not in memory of the victims of the Twin Towers, but in homage to the terrorist coup that brought down Chile’s democracy.

In an unintended endorsement, Pinochet died on December 10, International Human Rights Day.

By then, thirty million dollars stolen by him had turned up in one hundred and twenty accounts in various banks around the world. The revelation somewhat tarnished his prestige. Not because he was a crook, but because his take was so meager.

PHOTOGRAPH: THIS BULLET DOES NOT LIE

Santiago de Chile, Government House, September 1973.

We do not know the name of the photographer. It is the last image of Salvador Allende: he wears a helmet, walks with rifle in hand, looks up at the airplanes spitting out bombs.

The freely elected president of Chile said:

“I won’t get out of here alive.”

In the history of Latin America, that is an oft-heard expression. Many presidents say it, but at the moment of truth they decide to go on living in order to go on saying it.

Allende did not get out of there alive.

A KISS OPENED THE DOORS TO HELL

The kiss was the signal of betrayal, just as in the Gospels:

“Whomsoever I kiss, that same is the one.”

In Buenos Aires at the end of 1977, the Blond Angel kissed, one by one, the three founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Esther Balestrino, María Ponce, and Azucena Villaflor, as well as the nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet.

And the earth swallowed them. Spokesmen for the dictatorship denied holding the mothers and said the sisters were in Mexico working as prostitutes.

Later on it came out: all of them, mothers and sisters alike, had been tortured and thrown, still alive, from an airplane into the sea.

And the Blond Angel’s identity came out too. The papers published a photograph of Captain Alfredo Astiz, his head bowed, surrendering to the English, and despite his beard and cap he was recognized. It was the end of the Falklands War and he had not fired a shot. He was a specialist in another sort of heroism.

FAMILY PORTRAIT IN ARGENTINA

Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones proclaimed:

“For the good of the world, the hour of the sword has struck!” In this way he applauded the 1930 coup d’état, which installed a military dictatorship.

In the service of that dictatorship, the poet’s son, Police Chief Polo Lugones, devised new uses for the cattle prod and other instruments of coercion by experimenting on the bodies of the disobedient.

Forty-some years later, a disobedient named Piri Lugones, granddaughter of the poet, daughter of the police chief, endured her father’s techniques firsthand in the torture chambers of a more recent dictatorship.

That dictatorship disappeared thirty thousand Argentines.

Among them, her.

THE AGES OF ANA

In her first years, Ana Fellini believed her parents had died in an accident. That was what her grandparents told her. They said that her parents were on their way to pick her up when their plane went down.

At the age of eleven, someone else told her that her parents had died fighting Argentina’s military dictatorship. She asked nothing, said nothing. She had been a bubbly child, but from then on she said little or nothing.

At the age of seventeen, she had trouble kissing. There was a sore under her tongue.

At the age of eighteen, she had trouble eating. The sore was growing deeper.

At the age of nineteen, they operated.

At the age of twenty, she died.

The doctor said it was cancer of the mouth.

Her grandparents said it was the truth that killed her.

The neighborhood witch said she died because she did not scream.

THE NAME MOST TOUCHED

In the spring of 1979, the archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, traveled to the Vatican. He asked, pleaded, begged for an audience with Pope John Paul II:

“Wait your turn.”

“We don’t know.”

“Come back tomorrow.”

In the end, by lining up with the faithful waiting to be blessed, just one among the many, he surprised His Holiness and managed to steal a few minutes with him.

Romero tried to deliver a voluminous report with photographs and testimony, but the pope handed it back:

“I don’t have time to read all this!”

And Romero sputtered that thousands of Salvadoreans had been tortured and murdered by the military, among them many Catholics and five priests, and that just yesterday, on the eve of this audience, the army had riddled twenty-five people with bullets in the doorway of the cathedral.

The head of the Church stopped him right there:

“Mr. Archbishop, do not exaggerate!”

The meeting did not last much longer.

Saint Peter’s successor demanded, commanded, ordered:

“You must reach an understanding with the government! A good Christian does not look for trouble with the authorities! The Church wants peace and harmony!”

Ten months later, Archbishop Romero was shot down in a parish of San Salvador. The bullet killed him as he was saying Mass, at the moment he raised the host.

From Rome, the pontiff condemned the crime.

He forgot to condemn the criminals.

Years later, in Cuscatlán Park, names on an infinitely long wall commemorate the civilian victims of the war. Thousands upon thousands of names are etched in white on black marble. The letters of Archbishop Romero’s name are the only ones that show wear.

From the touch of so many fingers.

THE BISHOP WHO DIED TWICE