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The Liberation of Maria and Miguel

By Loretta Feller

Maria and her husband.Miguel live and work in the Cleveland area. They have two sons and one daughter. Maria is 32 years old. The family arrived in the United States in May, 1977. Since then, their status here has changd from that of political refugees to residents.

Miguel "disappeared” in Chile on September 15, 1976. He was a photographer and had been a supporter of President Salvador Allende. Since the assassination of Allende and Chile's takeover in 1973 by a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet and aided by the U.S., approximately 2,500 individuals have been listed as “disappeared”, despite international pressure for information about them. Tens of thousands more have been imprisoned, tortured, or killed, and a half million have gone into exile (see June issue of WSW).

In the following condensation of a conversation Maria and I had in Spanish, she tells of her actions on behalf of her husband after his disappearance. She also tells how the experience changed her concept of herself as a woman and her relationship with her husband.

Back then, I didn't understand politics in Chile. Maybe it was my upbringing, but I thought I didn't have the capacity to understand. One time, before I. was able to locate Miguel, I went to the jail in Arica, the city where we grew up and where we were living. I asked an employee at the jail if he might know where to find Miguel. He said, "Why are you looking here?Did your husband commit a crime?'

And I said, “No, but I've been everywhere looking for him, and I can't find him."

So he said, "Look, I'm going to give you some friendly advice. Your husband was detained for political reasons?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "Go to the 'regimiento [the administrative offices of the military government). Go to the mayor. Go everywhere."

I asked, "Do you think I'll find him?”

He said, "Throw yourself on the floor, cry, have your children cry-everything, because if you don't he will disappear and you will never see him again."

He gave me that advice, he said, as a friend. In spite of how that frightened me, I realized that if I did nothing, Miguel would not reappear. So I started plotting to find Miguel. I got my courage up, and I kept moving. I wonder now how I was brave enough to do all that I did.

The day Miguel was taken, I didn't know what I was going to do, what would happen to me, or if 1 would be able to do anything at all. My mother had no room, and my father had died years earlier. My mother couldn't come to stay with me to take care of the children, because she didn't know if or when. Miguel would appear. I didn't know what to do, because if I got a job, who would look for Miguel? Who would do what had to be done? Who would fill out the papers? So my mother and brother said, “You make the arrangements, Do everything you can. We may not eat as well, but we will see that at least the children are not hungry."

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I began at the U.S. Embassy where they were giving visas for political refugees who were not Communists. I took out passports for the children and got. their vaccinations. I went to the Minister of the Economy, to the Vicarate of Solidarity. I went everywhere to get the necessary papers.

Every day I would go to one office or another. I would ask to speak to the person in charge to talk to them about freeing Miguel, and to ask why he was detained. They would answer that he was too dangerous to let him free in the country. I would ask, "Why is he dangerous? Has he killed someone or

ant She Wants/September 1980

tried to kill someone?" And they would say, "No, but because he is political, he cannot leave."

I wanted to put on the pressure, saying that he was the support of the household, that without him my children didn't have enough to eat. I spent so much

time in the "regimiento" that a little more and I would have slept there.

I would arrive early in the morning with the three children, so they could see that I needed my husband, so they would feel uncomfortable. I would start to cry, and then the children would start to cry when they saw me crying. Why? Because I wanted to

pressure them to let me see Miguel. They were fed up with me. It was like one of those soap operas.

Finally, after a month of not knowing where he was, they let me see Miguel. They let us talk across a table with a soldier standing there listening to everything. They had tortured him a lot, but had let him recover for about a week before I saw him. That way, there was nothing on his face, but when I touched him, he screamed from the pain that he had internally. He still has a lot of pain. He told me they had an outline of the human body drawn on the wall with places marked where they could hit so as not to leave a mark. They only gave blows that damaged the insides.

That was the first I had seen or heard from Miguel since he disappeared a month earlier. The next day they told me they had transferred him from Arica to Santiago, which was quite far from where we lived [about the distance from Cleveland to Miami). So I lost track of him again, because I couldn't go to Santiago immediately.

I moved to Santiago then, to be near the concentration camp where they held Miguel. I lived with my brother during this time. It was very difficult with three children, to worry every single day about three mouths to feed. This time was very difficult for the children too. When we went to see Miguel at the concentration camp, they screamed and cried because they could not comprehend why papa couldn't leave with us."

The concentration camp was divided. On one side were women, women with children, even pregnant women. Many women were detained and tortured the

same as men or even worse.

In Santiago again I went everywhere, asking for letters to present in various places, getting interviews with one man after another. One time I got an ap pointment to speak with an aide of one of the main heads of the government. There I was very polite.

But I never went anywhere alone. I always went with one of the children because women walking alone could disappear too. Of course, one could disappear with a child, but it would be more difficult since a child would cry.

Miguel was in prison almost a year. I managed to

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Working Class Women in Chile, 1980

With the military coup of September 11, 1973, many Chilean women were rudely awakened to the depth of political polarization in their country. In numerous cases, the Pinochetregime destroyed a woman's family life: husband, father, brother or son were arrested, tortured, perhaps executed, exiled or simply made to disappear. A number of women are also subjected to the same atrocities.

It has been these women, especially the relatives of the disappeared, who have been in the forefront of ' resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship. Few of these women were ever involved in political activities before, or even understood the degree of involvement of their loved ones before they disappeared.

Cultural "machismo" has restricted women's role to that of housewife, mother, and consumer of goods. Even during the presidency of Allende, the general feeling was that the best support a woman could give her militant husband was tending to his domestic needs.

This year, at the first anniversary of the founding of the National Secretariat Office on Women, Pinochet stated: "Once a woman becomes a mother, she wants nothing else. She discovers in her child the

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reason for living. He is her only treasure, the fulfillment of her dreams." The goal of this new government Secretariat is to activate upper class women's generosity to volunteer time, collect funds, and perforin "works of mercy". At the same time, working class women are being victimized by the government's new pro-birth plan in the name of "national security". Free family planning programs in existence since the early 1960's have been eliminated. Participation of women in political parties and trade unions is still minimal, but these organizations themselves are becoming aware of the need to bring women into full participation. One workers' federation, the FUT, has declared, "There will be no libera tion of the working class without the effective libera! tion of working class women. This is a social proces that affects all of us as human beings.".

Women from Chile's working class are increasing ly indignant as they and their families suffer the ef fects of the Pinochet government's political and economic policies. Many have organized, and ofter such women have struggled against the dictatorship discovering their value as persons and their strengt as a group in the process.