Addendum: as though there is nothing else on the drawing board: excerpted from in light of the recent events: the Chile Declassification Project

During the late 1990s, in response to pressure from human rights groups, the Clinton administration initiated the Chile Declassification Project. The project directed federal agencies to make public a selection of files documenting United States policy in Chile.

For the period following the U.S.-supported military coup of September 11, 1973, the declassified documents closely monitor developments in Chile under the new military regime. The Pinochet government, combatting what it referred to as "extremism" or "terrorism," swiftly imposed a range of security measures, including preventive detention, secret trials, and a widespread crack-down on dissent.

Addendum is derived from files among the declassified government documents pertaining to this postcoup period.

One searches in vain, it would seem, across thousands of pages generated after the coup, for any break or opening in a pattern of description in which politics is always figured as a tension--or as a cycle of violence--between clear-cut entities known as "the state" and "the terrorists." In the few instances during our research when we thought we might have stumbled upon documents that did not fit this pattern, closer examination indicated we were deluding ourselves. For example, the adjacent photographs--from a group of Defense Intelligence Agency files from 1983 documenting the bombing of utility poles by alleged terrorists--seemed at first to indicate that the picture was not so cut and dried, or at least to point to the possibility that "terrorism" as such, whatever its starkly real manifestations and implications, was also something of a phantasm.

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But this perception, on further analysis, can perhaps only be attributed to the fact that these photographs have been reproduced so many times that when they reach us in the declassification process, they fail any longer to specify their subject. The single instance in which the dynamic of terror and counterterror appears to have been thrown into question is in an unusual group of photographs which are part of an addendum to the Defense Intelligence Agency files that catalogue the bombed utility poles. One of the photographers on that particular assignment (likely a Chilean national working for the United States) submitted, in addition to the images of blown-up power lines, two rolls of black-and-white film containing photographs of messages that two people, in a kind of ongoing conversation, appeared to have intermittently posted on a single utility pole somewhere in Santiago. The translations are modified from the Defense Intelligence Agency texts.

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I know you are alive. But where are you? Have you been detained for questioning? Are you now released on your own recognizance? What do you look like? I will recognize you, or at least your words, if you leave me a note.

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Here I am. I saw you the other day while crossing the boulevard. I yelled out your name and started waving my arms frantically. It was as if my body took over, making gross gestures my brain couldn't control. Then, almost as quickly as the flailing began, I pulled myself together, put my head down, and kept walking.

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I am forgetting how to laugh. Maybe the jokes are too easy to come by now--see the funny soldiers marching in unison, see the silly communists shout in unison, see el duce nod approvingly in secret to both sides of this tired equation! Is it not pointless to joke? Laughter becomes too difficult and painful, it becomes something other than laughter altogether, something to dread, something to be avoided because it only makes me feel miserable. Laughter used to be the best last resort in a grim situation, but nothing's funny anymore. Did you hear the one about watching what you say? I almost died laughing.

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A bomb goes off. Everything turns dark. I stumble around the house, blind, looking for a candle and some matches. I find the matches, but no candle. It takes three matches, burning down to my fingers, to make my way across the kitchen, down the hall, through the bedroom, and into a closet. Then everything goes black again.

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When will we meet face to face? "When those flayed again have skin"? Today, it seems a long way off. But is it merely a matter of waiting for a sea change, of hoping that the entire city will soon see the splendor in the wind, or of cultivating "the right conditions" in which the inevitable revolt will break out? Why worry about the security forces when there are such pernicious fantasies to fight against? I'm not banking on the poor or the party or the protest or the police or la patria, as though there is nothing else on the drawing board. Everything's on the drawing board! Still, that doesn't mean I know what to do, or what I'm doing. If I refuse to choose sides, am I just marking time in some make-believe in-between space?

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group