Word: chiles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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December 22--My Spanish friend Enrique and I crossed the border from Argentina today, smuggling in a recent issue of an Argentina magazine which contained an article warning us about life in Chile. The article explained that economic crisis had reduced the once gay and voluble daily life of Chile to a bitter struggle for survival. It said unemployment in greater Santiago approached 20 per cent while inflation continued at an annual rate of over 300 per cent. (These figures were confirmed in January by El Mercurio, one of Santiago's three pro-junta newspapers). We had feared we would...
December 28--Today we met Hans, a 65-year-old leftist who was born in Austria and came to Chile in the 1930s fleeing Hitler. He and his buddies, other desperate, old and some not-so-old radicals, hand around the park which lines the Mapocho River. Hans used to put his cosmopolitan background to use in the hotel business--he speaks three languages--but the tourists are afraid of Chile these days; the hotels are empty and Hans has been out of work for over a year...
...five bookstores today looking for Pablo Neruda's memoirs. The junta has banned the book because the last three pages, written in the 13 days between the coup and Neruda's death, show too vividly the bitterness of a dying man. (I later bought the book outside of Chile, Neruda wrote,.... Then tanks entered into action, many tanks, to fight bravely against one man alone, the president of the Republic of Chile, Salvador Allende, who awaited them in his office, without more company than his great heart, enveloped in smoke and flames...
January 12--One of our new friends, Pablo, seems to have connections with the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), Chile's most extreme socialist group. He was a high-school teacher before the coup, was arrested, taken to the stadium, served over a year in jail and now tries to survive by selling balloons in the parks. He said the prisoners at the stadium were given nothing to eat or drink for eight days...
Hans said he heard over the short-wave radio last night--Radio Moscow beams special transmissions to Chile--that Edward Kennedy had again charged the Pinochet government with torture. The Chilean papers obliquely acknowledge the attacks of Kennedy and others in order to villify them--in Kennedy's case, by bringing up Chappaquidick...