The Game of Expression under Pinochet: Four Theater Stories

Introduction

From 1973 to 1990, Chile was governed by a military dictatorship, which had overthrown the elected government of Salvador Allende Gossens three years into his six-year term. Many players participated in the movements for change that led Chile back to a civilian government in 1990--social scientists, lawyers, union leaders, grass-roots community leaders, politicians, and artists. Least recognized in accounts of Chile's redemocratization were the artists, who, almost immediately after the 1973 coup, began laying a groundwork for later strategies that eventually put an end to military rule.

The following accounts are excerpts from four of the more than one hundred interviews I made between 1994 and 1999 for a book I am writing, Symbols of Resistance: A Chilean Legacy, to tell the artists' story--a story reaffirming that, during times of fear, social inequity, and political conflict, artists can and do influence political process and public opinion.

--Joanne Pottlitzer

Raúl Osorio, Theater Director

One morning, two men wearing berets and carrying a military pouch arrived at the Teatro Angel [the small theater where Tres Marías y una Rosa (Three Marys and a Rose) was playing] to deliver a summons for me to appear at the Ministry of Defense at 8:00 A.M. the following day. I was to present myself to the chief of state of the Emergency Zone (who wasn't there at the time; I saw one of his assistants or representatives). Rebeca and David [Rebeca Ghigliotto, Osorio's wife, a well-known television actress, and David Benavente, who co-authored the play] and I met and agreed on what to do. It was terribly dangerous. You could enter that building and never come out--that was definitely a possibility. But I had to go. They knew where I lived, they knew where I worked. . . . The alternative would have been to ask for help directly. I decided to go. All I did was put on a tie, dress very elegantly, tuck the script of Tres Marías y una Rosa under my arm--and Rebeca and David and I left for the Ministry of Defense.

I was taken to the top floor of the Ministry. Rebeca and David remained below in a large room. Rebeca said there was a very noisy waxing machine outside that room and that they had commented that maybe it made a lot of noise to drown out the screams. Today the story is humorous, but at that moment . . .

When I got to the top floor, or one of the top floors, of the Ministry of Defense, I entered a hallway and walked past two or three doors--there were several offices on both sides. Two military men wearing berets took me inside the last door and said, "Wait here." I stood against the door and saw that there were three or four offices on my right that said, "Anti-Guerrilla Group," where meetings were held or something to do with the guerrillas, and another related to "Subversion." I was standing there when suddenly a guy shot out one of the office doors. He was covered with blood, his shirttails out, his shirt open. You could see his chest, it was bleeding. He leaned up against the other wall and almost fell over the only chair in the hall. My first reaction was absolute terror. My legs began to tremble, and I steadied myself against the door. I felt that I could fall. And then I started to guess, started to understand where I was. This was no public office, it was a torture center.

Then two men dressed as civilians, in shirt sleeves, grabbed him and continued beating him in front of me. They kicked him, hit him on the mouth, on the head, he fell, he groaned, they picked him up again, the guy was practically dead. Air came out of his lungs only when the...