Word: towns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jorge is a law-abiding citizen of Santiago, an academic. He drives a Fiat, goes to the movies, shops at the overflowing markets, and lives in a nice part of town very near General Pinochet. At 2 or 3 a.m. most nights, he receives phone calls. The anonymous, "unofficial" callers say, "Your children are dead meat. We will cut off their arms and legs." And so on. About twice a year, Jorge attends the funeral of a friend who has disappeared in the middle of the night. Also unofficial...
Most citizens of the Santiago I visited had never been to the other part of the city, the barrios. The government tells them, and it is probably true, that it is dangerous for them to cross the line from the upper to the lower part of town. It is dangerous because the people of the barrios are desperate...
...kind of place where people know each other by name and trust each other by nature. "You can go downtown without a dime in your pocket, do your shopping and come back to pay later," says City Councilman J. Brent Madill. "It's not faceless like L.A." In any town, the brutal killing of a teenage girl leaves a deep mark, but in Hanford the wound remains, 24 years after the crime. And now the U.S. Supreme Court has rubbed the wound open again all these years later...
...justice throughout the country. But their imprint is felt most immediately on a smaller scale among the people whose controversies the court has ruled upon. People in Hanford understand the larger principle the court recently reaffirmed--that blacks may not be systematically excluded from grand juries--but most in town are horrified that the result may be the release of a man they believe is a fearsome killer...
...town see it differently. Burdella Minter, who moved to Hanford in 1973, began researching Hillery's case after being asked to sign one of the petitions to deny him parole. An organist for the black congregation of the Second Baptist Church, she helped lead a drive in support of parole for Hillery, mustering 480 signatures. Minter believes that if a fair trial finds Hillery guilty, he should go back to prison. "If you do the crime, you do the time," she says, with the air of someone who has thought about what the words mean: her own stepson is serving...