The Open Wounds – The Counter

I entered the career of Medicine at the University of Concepción in 1973. We were 300 students, many of whom dressed in the style of the time, with jeans, beads, ponchos and backpacks from the altiplano and wore long hair split in the middle and thick mustachos that fell down bordering the corners of the lips. We weren’t all from the MIR, but we looked like we were. The most hippies, by the way, were the object of observation and care for by the hardest militancy of the Popular Unity, in particular by the communists. The Red Stone festival in Santiago, sequel to Woodstock, had been demolished by the official press and also the non-official press of the time, however it had in turn had a sequel of bad death in Quillón, on the way to Bulnes.
The winter holidays of that year had been delayed by strikes and student mobilizations and we were just starting the second semester when the coup d’état came. In fact, I registered the bouquets and returned to the south to a party that had remained in the inkwell. There I was when my father installed the battery-powered radio with the marches and military sides that Tuesday in the nightstand. The Italian Girl Comes to Marry had ended and ended well, as expected, while it had been becoming increasingly difficult to dialogue in the Republic of Chile and the social environment had been twitching and tensioning strongly, to the point of reaching this result that finally did not surprise us. The situation did not give for more, we were waiting for it.
I studied the second year in a unique environment, having reduced the size of the course by half. Some of my colleagues disappeared from the map and many others, some friends, kept repeating organic chemistry, which was a real sieve. I scraped past, but skated in second year, so I met friends a year later. My second year was complex and I was about to drop out. I deepened my “hippie” -a mixture between the Big Lebowski and the Chino Rios- and stopped attending classes in the second semester, as a result of which I lost all the branches but having half of the credits plus one did not expel me from the race. This was decisive to continue there despite the “hidden curriculum” -which is well described by the DECSA of the Faculty of Medicine- and to meet the generation that today are my former classmates of the wasap. Those who entered in 1974 plus those who repeated in 1973, to all finally graduate in 1980. The early eighties.
The new course looked neater, on average. The miracho look faded and was replaced by a more hippie look in some of us, the least. They became more noticeable and frequent than before the formal-looking classmates who arrived in their cars. Two poles were established, one pro-military regime, the “fachos” and one against the regime, the “rogelios” or “comunachos”. I placed myself with the “rogelios” because there I felt more comfortable, despite coming from a Christian Democratic family. Music became the nexus to iron out mistrust and shorten distances with the hard militancy mentioned above, certainly aided by the common enemy. With the “fachos”, except exceptionally, we did not cross words. However, I had good relations with fellow Pinochet enthusiasts, admirers of the work of the regime, but who were more open. Now, I think today, they had power in their favor and perhaps the relations were not so symmetrical, perhaps somewhat stocomic.
The “rogelios”, however, lived in the conviction that we were part of an immense majority of Chileans who remained silent for fear of repression, a majority that was deeply opposed to the dictatorship. Then we used music and the arts as a means to channel the discontent of that vast majority. We believed that the plebiscite of 80 had been completely a fraud, fears through. Then, when we tried to understand why the people of Chile had not risen up to defend President Allende and his popular government in September of ’73, we began to realize that things were not as we supposed. There was an immense majority who actually lived quite quietly, who turned a blind eye to human rights, who watched Giant Saturdays and Japenning with Ja on Sundays or who simply bought the idea of ceasing to be proletarians and becoming owners. The victims of the consumer society. The hormIGAS of the moles. Neither “fachos” nor “rogelios”. The “ungrateful”, as Doña Lucía would say when she won the NO.
Years later we met the graduates of 80 for the first time, Moors and Christians, “fachos” and “rogelios”. We danced, drank, got drunk and sang. And later we got back together, and then again and again. We did it a little anxiously, but we talked with a certain ease, recognized each other and remembered each other. We seemed to be missing. We now had conversations that we never had before. We talk about everything, our political differences and we even laugh. Did we reconcile?
With the passing of these encounters, the idea that reconciliation was possible began to assail me. We had materialized the miracle among classmates of a course that attended, worth the redundancy, in an atmosphere of distancing marked by a social crisis that had led us to the fierce institutional breakdown that our Chile had experienced, a scenario in which we had to enter the scene, in 1974, the newcomers and the repeaters arrived before, in 1973. We met again and how important it would be, I thought, to be able to show it to the wounded country. Until the social explosion came and everything began to be like yesterday. In the explicit manifestations of our wasap course group, the first discrepancies emerged, some verbal violence and pain. Some withdrew. Actually, I think now, maybe we were the same. The miracle had not been verified and perhaps it was naïve to pretend so. They were dreams of the old hippie.

And now, three years after the outbreak and without a new Constitution, I look at the country and see the same thing, the open wounds. Consider the voracious and undisguised attempt to overthrow President Piñera during the outbreak and then during the pandemic and please observe today the parliamentary discussion on budget, tax reform, pension reform and reconfiguration of the path to a new Constitution. . What country is this? Those who were violently expropriated in those years of Popular Unity may justify what came next. Those who were subjected to disappearances and torture by the state apparatus will think that such a thing has no justification. And so it is that at the moment of sitting at the conversation tables to build the future, to design public policies that lead to the progress of all, such a thing becomes impossible because there is a background conversation, larval, a vesicular murmur that tells us that the one you have in front was, has been and will be your enemy. That is, the reasons that led us to the breakdown back then appear today as unprocessed, as pending, as if the fault had only been the other’s. And perhaps this has no solution, perhaps it is nothing more than a new version of an obsolete “class struggle”. If so, the question is how do we avoid the contagion of the new generations with these wounds, how do we cut the conveyor belt. Hasn’t the world changed? Perhaps we can do something before it is too late for us. Or is it that the revolution will finally come?

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Original source in Spanish