What we usually do when we want to explore a city is we go in early and find a good parking spot and use GANNET2 as our base, a place to rest, eat a snack, use the toilet and to leave Rusty while we visit a museum or a restaurant. We have also found weekends are best as commute traffic is reduced and though museum attendance is higher the whiter streets are easier to navigate. It works for us and it worked in Santiago when we snagged a shady spot in the free public parking at Parque De Los Reyes, a place I dare say we could have cover the night had we wished to.
It’s a lovely recreation area with lots of grass and trees, a bike path, soccer fields, an outdoor gym and the world’s deepest most fearsome skate park; in my ignorance it looked like that. And there are a few rules and I will say not every dog was leashed but the place was clean and the dogs we met were relaxed.
I don’t know if the photo shows it but this thing was deep and steep.
We took a twenty minute Uber, leaving Rusty to have a nap after his first walk of a long day. I have to remind myself he’s twelve years old and not as energetic as he was, which saddens me but is probably just as well. He was a terror when we first got him, disappearing into the mangroves for hours at a time.
The thing about Chile I find is that it looks very normal. It feels like the US, no street vendors to speak of, no beggars, lots of people riding bikes for pleasure, fashionable youngsters, orderly traffic with no horns honking. After all the color and chaos and street culture of the dozen countries that have gone before Chile is a welcome change of pace.
First on our list was the Museum of Human Rights. In 1973 Augusto Pinochet who was serving as a General during President Salvador Allende’s administration orchestrated a coup that ended civilian democratic rule until 1990.
Allende had been democratically elected two years prior and was trying to implement a socialist agenda inimical to the generals. It was during the Cold War and the CIA was playing whack-a-mole with leftist rebellions all over the place and when Allende looked like he might get congressional support for his economic plans Pinochet stepped in and took Chile to a very dark place. The museum celebrated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as approved by the new United Nations in 1948 after the catastrophe of World War 2. It was, you might say, a time of hope.
If you want a taste of what happened you could watch Costa Gavras’ movie titled Missing starting Jack Lemmon.
Thousands disappeared, imprisoned tortured and murdered, buried in mass graves dropped alive into the ocean from helicopters and no account was given. To this day there are people who vanished and their relatives still grieve.
The Cold War was a strange time with fear of communism motivating the west to support social change to counter communist propaganda while at the same time spies and diplomats were engaged in their own cold war. You can see why generals and business leaders in Chile wanted no part of Allende’s agenda. What no one expected was the slaughter.
The museum explains this by illustrating the tenor of the times, the long hair, the bell bottoms, the demands for change from the youngsters. The displays also show how the country expected a coup surprisingly. One came and failed and a few months later Pinochet led a second coup that saw key fighters bombing the capital and tanks rolling through the streets.
After 1990, the period of the fall at last of communism and incidentally Pinochet the country started finding corpses including in that distant beach town Pisagua where we enjoyed a waterfront camp with Cora and Florian.
There was a bed frame on display with electrodes where subversives were electrocuted for information. The video above showed film of victims who were arrested and held in improvised jails, like sports arenas, and were beaten and electrocuted. It was riveting. And revolting.
Pinochet argued it was all necessary to defeat communism. I don’t think Allende program would have benefited Chile’s economy but wholesale slaughter of a democratically elected president and his supports seems like no answer at all to anything. They were crazy times. Pinochet was as corrupt as the worst of them pocketing money, rewarding his cronies and creating an even worse economic divide in Chile. At least Allende was not in the business of enjoying torture and on economics he couldn’t have fared worse than Pinochet. What a waste.
We got there early but we were pretty soon in a crowd. Admission was free.
The coffee was delicious as we pondered what we had seen.
Even if you know about it confronting torture 51 years after it started is still upsetting.
The end of Pinochet who claimed mental decrepitude when they tried to put him on trial was celebrated at the time but he died in 2006 facing hundreds of criminal charges.
We got back to the park, picked up Rusty and walked to a meeting spot previously arranged to meet Michael, an American journalist and his Brazilian wife Silvia and their two young daughters. In the background the snow covered Andes.
We first met the family in Oaxaca Mexico as they traveled by RV to places where Mike could find interesting reports.
I don’t think working as a freelance reporter is easy but they travel all over Latin America in pursuit of the news.
You can hear Mike Fox on “The World” on public radio and he also produces podcasts titled “Under the Shadow” on the NSCLA network. reporting on Latin America.
And there he was at it again:
The girls love Rusty and want a dog of their own until that is I had to pick up after my dog. That was a reality check for them.
A great walk through a great park.
On our drive across town to our next campground we passed something I find interesting which is food delivery by bicycle. I’ve seen a few electric bikes but also these gas powered Whizzers. In other countries they do it by motorcycle but here everything tends to be a little bit different.
Stay out of the bus lane unless you are turning right.
Orderly traffic.
The campground is at 3600 feet and the last couple of miles were on steep dirt. Fun. Kind of…but Layne wasn’t enthusiastic.
The campground looked rural but we never met the owner. All communication was by WhatsApp message and Layne paid by PayPal.
Rusty is not fond of cows. He watched them closely as the gauchos (cowboys) and their dogs herded the herd. Yellowstone come to life.
Our campground with hot showers and clean sinks for dishwashing.
$15 a night and electrical plug in at 220 volts so we have to use a converter.
No shade but it’s a peaceful spot.
Rusty was too tired to enjoy it so he slept. As did we.
