Chile's museum of terror and survival - GlobalPost

[pampango]

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/chile/100216/memory-human-rights-museum

SANTIAGO, Chile — “I’m not ready for this,” the 10-year-old boy said to his mother as she showed him around a hallway full of photos, press clips and videos testifying to Chile's 17 years of terror and repression during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The woman nevertheless took his hand gently and led him along the recently opened Memory and Human Rights Museum, explaining that the tens of thousands of documentary, film and photographic archives and art pieces, which to him were just history, represent a vivid and painful past for older generations.

The museum was inaugurated by President Michelle Bachelet in January, her last and probably greatest legacy in preserving Chile’s historical memory from oblivion before she leaves office in March. By mid-February, the museum had received more than 45,000 visitors, according to its director, Romy Schmidt. “This museum reflects the need of Chilean society to know, to see, to understand what happened between 1973 and 1990. We want to show the facts so people can develop their own opinion about what went on in here, without any ideological bias or distortion, just showing things as they were,” said Schmidt.

One of the first things visitors see on the first floor is television footage — part of it censored at the time — of the coup itself, the interior of the destroyed presidential palace and the repression that ensued. Dozens of people were glued to those screens, and in low whispers asked one another: “Where were you that day? What were you doing?”

[Hannah Bell]

1. 9/11/73: Yo pisaré las calles nuevamente...

I will walk these streets again
The streets of bloody Santiago
And in a beautiful free plaza
I'll stop to mourn the missing

I'll come from the burning desert
Across lakes & woods
And on a hill in Santiago
I'll remember my brothers who went before

With those who did little or much
Who wanted to free the land
Who were hit by the first bullets
Sooner, not later, without giving up

We will bring back the books & songs
Burned by the murderers
Rebuild my ruined city
& make the traitors pay for their crimes.

A child will play in a garden
And sing with new friends
And the song will be the song of the earth
For a life lost in the Moneda


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOzrfXpEhWg

[malaise]

2. I will never forget

All in the name of democracy

[Scurrilous]

3. K & R

:thumbsup:

[leftstreet]

4. K&R

[gratuitous]

5. Lucky for some in the United States

There will always be those who are not ready for an examination of our past, so we will never have to confront any of it. But boy, do we like bossing other countries around, telling them how they need to deal with shameful episodes in their past.