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His image is the symbol of the persistence of memory in our country. His mourning, endless and immeasurable, the banner of the struggle that led, representing in his body the history of victims of human rights violations under dictatorship. Ana González de Recabarren remembers her tocopillana childhood, her arrival in Santiago, the communist youth, the first images of her love, Manuel. A testimony that also appears in the pages of his autobiography, which has just finished.
The strength of his face in a newly inaugurated mural, the same in every march for justice, truth and memory. Insurgent, wife of a special guerrilla she had not even imagined, when the twentieth century had not reached its first half, in Tocopilla, in northern Chile. Ana González (1925), the historical leader of the Association of Missing and Communist Parents since she was a teenager, observes the faces of her family, "mine," as she examines the rings between her lean hands, her flawless nails, and red. It does so to begin to remember, well before this troubling day, when infamy broke a Chile that failed to regain its democratic and republican density; a Chile that has not managed to find life again.
Manuel Guillermo (22 years old), married, two children, gas pipeline; Luis Emilio (29), graphic arts technician, former union leader and his wife, 20-year-old Nalvia Rosa Mena, three-month pregnant, housewife and their two-and-a-half-year-old son Luis Emilio Recabarren Mena, Puntito, were kidnapped by the National Intelligence Directorate (Dina) as part of an operation carried out by agents near his family's home on Sebastopol Street in Santa Rosa. The brothers Recabarren González owned a printing press in Nataniel 47. They followed the office of his father, Manuel Segundo Recabarren Rojas, who went to look for them very early the next day. He did not return either. They say to have seen it at Villa Grimaldi. His track is lost in August of this year. Puntito, the grandson whom state agents have left at the mercy of the persecuted street, is the only one to have survived.
They took them all
The house of Recabarren González in San Joaquín, it is part of this lost country. The door was closed a few days later never to be back. Manuel, who was the union leader of graphic design, president of the unions of the Editorial University and the publisher Nascimento and president of the San Miguel Supply and Prices Councils (JAP). Everyone, including Ana, has never stopped being a member of the Communist Party. Ana, a popular leader, president of the neighborhood council, has lived to organize and find ways to reduce social inequalities.
After this April 30, there was nothing but silence from the outside, from the street without trust. , in front of this grid which remains closed by a big chain. It closed like that because the sound of the lock was shaking Ana every day with a false noise, the same noise that has perpetuated the dictatorship.
A door that will only open when they return.
A sea of Tocopilla in Santiago
His house in San Joaquín is short and flanked by a winter tree covered with plastic flowers, small as in the south. It's a house wide open to the interior because her daughter Patricia has decided to come back from Argentina to open it to those who want to hear about the tragedy and that proud nobility that means "to fight with joy".
Sting, Manuel Joan Serrat, Gladys Marín, "La Tencha", José Miguel Varas ("We went out to lunch with him and his wife, Iris Largo, I loved him a lot") and so much of it. others are placed on the walls as timeless images, hung on this house refuses to be adopted. He refuses because to deny it, is to deny Chile. It is refused because a book hopes to be published. The memories of Ana González no longer reveal their author. They are there, ready to be published, completed one after the other; poetic, torn, firm like son recovered from the twentieth and twenty-first century. Here pbades the story of a country of trizaduras and blasting, and is also drawn as a person who follows in the footsteps of a sketch, a country of infinite tenderness that, today. It is sometimes difficult to imagine.
"I was born in the north, in Toco, then my parents sold and bought two houses in Tocopilla, and I think that they bought in the best street because on the side of the block were all of them. "family people," as we call it, and in front of pure prostitutes, so I grew up playing with your children, and when my brothers were about 18 and my mother had they brought him wine or beer and, without my mother's knowledge, I went out, never, never, did I see a bad example, "he recalls with a laugh, acknowledging that years of innocence were full of games, affections, social clbad crossings, dialogues; difficult years too. Several years of photography and she is part of it with her parents.
"I left the cigar many years ago, one day I said," If I want to live and continue to fight for mine and continue to live in this country, I have to stop smoking "and I left overnight without ever smoking Do you know when I feel like it? When I go to a human rights meeting and people come out to smoke, I go out and I ask one to give a little chupadita, and that's what I do, nothing more, "she says, portrayed a thousand times, hair styled and cigar in hand, avoiding the worry masked by decades of waiting.When there is a demonstration or a human rights related activity and it's nice weather, Ana leaves the house and Patricia takes her.September of this year was heavy, cold and spiral: with a minister who did not last a week, a mbadive revolt by living memory and widespread outrage against Anna left little in September, but she read, listened and saw many things. His struggle, so numerous, deserves it.
Today, he laughs on his side when he spends his childhood in the north: "With my sister Olga, we did all the" bad things "we played the balls, the horse It was a beautiful time and my mother liked to hoist the flag on the window, this furniture, with the anthem. "As the hymn progressed, she waved the flag with all the young people of the neighborhood, in those years, an aunt who lived in Santiago – on my father's side, the family is from Rancagua, even his socialist brothers were alderman and mayor – he went north to I was in sixth grade of high school, then my aunt thought to talk to my mother so that she let me go with her to Santiago and that I could follow the humanities; There was none in the north, and I came by boat with her, "he recalls.
This boat trip marked this era. As he looked at an old mask, he closes his eyes and says that he even feels the sluggishness with which he moves forward, as if his bed was coming from Tocopilla, where his father, like thousands of people, was going to sleep. men of the beginning of the last century, was looking for gold – he was a hoarder – and found Ana's mother, a widow with six children ("they were the Vargas"). They had two others and a life of hard work and afternoons in the sun. "The most beautiful days were those in which we all played chaya, we threw water and said" chayaaa! "The street was the patio and they pulled out the troughs the adult people, everyone, we played, they climbed up to the ceilings and from there they heard "chayaaa!" and threw the water while having lunch, the night it was always on The place is as if I had seen it.This game was lost, even the kelp paper chaya looks minimal. "These were houses and streets open, block after block.
Ana, already in Santiago, studied in high school and helped her aunt Ana González de Peñaloza. "It was a wonderful woman, I did not see another one like that, he sewed the measuring pants, a job that he then sent to the tailors of the center." He had five machines Sewing and the agents who put the rack all in your house.When playing, at thirteen, he already knew how to make pants.They put the bracero to have coal for the plates. "He started his life in the capital.
Manuel
"I was about 16 years old and in Bulnes, city where I lived with my uncles, on the way to Valparaíso, there was a Communist Party headquarters. Was going to be aware of politics at that time, but there, in this very modest place, dances take place every Saturday, I was fed up with people, there was never any my aunt gave me permission to go.I did nothing to avoid following my aunt's advice.At that time, at my house, there was a large window overlooking the street.There was a young man who looked so fair.He was Manuel, Manuel Recabarren.At that time he had reached the lower level of the syllabary, but he was so intelligent, so hardworking, child, he learned to read. "One day, announcing" reserved with cakes! " And the dance continued, Ana and Manuel met. "In these dances, I got to know the young communists, they were perfect and there was Manuel, the boy I saw every day from my window when he came from work.It was very good , with 16 years dominated all politics of Chile and abroad, being from a destitute family.With eight years old, he was already going to the river to get stones for construction. Near Renca, by the river, he also polished, but Manuel eventually came to work in the printing house, I recommended it to my friends, but he did not listen to it. "I said he's faithful," true to the love he had for me, "You know when a young man falls in love with it." We'd never talked about it, but I admired him, so I joined JJCC and invited Manuel to La Jota to attend the meetings because he knew a lot, so it was easier to "The first time I was invited to La Jota, there were about fifteen young people, and that caught my attention to see how they looked at the girl he wanted and I admired." were organized. They chose the president, the secretary, a finance representative. They were very different from the young people we knew. They were very respectful. Manuel me conquered because of his beautiful attitude. I only fought with Manuel. "
Ana was captivated by her intelligence and tenacity." I fell in love with him because I saw him as very serious, too serious. We had a workshop with my aunt in Santo Domingo 1240. In this colonial house with three patios, a painter also had a workshop, and in the middle were union leaders of bars, fountains and restaurants. The day of meetings was full, "he remembers the early days spent together in this kind of community, part of an old house." My aunt let us live together; He was very human.
He later worked at El Siglo. He arrived until the second year at school, but later he gave lectures at the university. He was rigorous in his training, he had a responsibility before the game. We had a line: organize people, give lectures, go out to paint the streets for the elections, in the brigades; we made the dough in paraffin pots to stick the propaganda. At that time, young people were going out to do propaganda, not now; today are from other times, other forms. It was a beautiful time, a great union and a great joy. With Manuel, we had six children … I'm talking about Manuel with enthusiasm. "
" For the inhabitants of the city "
" The capitalists do not put the capital at the service of the young, so that young people be overcome. They only exploit them to pay less, "says Ana with the conviction that characterizes her.The same who always made vote for Salvador Allende, that she met in the marriage of Francia Palestro, in a big house with great courses. "We were invited by my neighbors, socialist activists, with whom we always agreed, even if there was a discord between the parties. Allende arrived at this wedding. Imagine what it was. We organized a line to greet the new president. In this we understood that Allende was greeting and saluting, but perhaps because he had so many leaders behind him who had spoken to him, he was not looking who he was in front of him. Well, it's my turn and he shakes my hand, but I looked back, but I do not give mine. Then he feels that they do not shake his hand and he turns to look at me. It's at that moment that I look at it and say, "You know, Mr. President, when they shake my hand, I like to be looked in the eyes." And so it was, "he recalls.
Then came the coup, the day when everything collapsed, because" there was no support when it was ". he was president; He was very alone, only the communists responded to him. It was very hard that day and those who followed. "Ana never wanted to leave Chile, they did not want it.A few hours before the outbreak of her own tragedy, On April 29, 1976, Ana made a flyer to distribute the first of May. "Pucha that Bonito writes, Manuel said," now remembers one of the last sentences that sometimes spring in the memories of the terror of those years, before yielding to emptiness and struggle, without Manuel, without two of his children, without one of his beautiful daughters and without the grandson she expected. "One day I I entered the port of memories, I opened the old dusty chest, between amazed and amazed, like garugas in the sky, I saw pages and pages flying (…). So I gave birth to this book that more or less, that's life itself, "reads Ana reading over fragments of the hundreds of pages that she has written for years. [19659002] She says she "spun for a while" while she looks at Manuel's portrait in front of her bed, that of her missing children. "I've grown older, not my old man ; mine has not aged, only I have aged it. "
The book," he emphasizes, "addresses the inhabitants of the city, because I stubbornly continue to live; I am a woman captivated by the love of his people "and will remain while looking for a more human Chile and finding his own, because" we must seek not to lose hope, even between us, between simple meetings "like those from the times of chaya
"I see today – he warns – that popular parties have lost, but there will always be committed people and with new ways to fight, to bring people together; Do not forget that the parties of the bourgeoisie will never be left behind. That's why I think Allende was very advanced. On January 28, 2004, Ana wrote: "Letter from Ana González to Juan Emilio Cheyre", to which she said: "I suffer for the magic and the dreamers of my daughter-in-law Nalvia, aged 21, pregnant with three years. months, for my children Luis Emilio and Mañungo, and for my husband Manuel.All have been arrested and hidden in the depths of the earth.But I do not only suffer from my pain of absence, I die a little every days thinking about what my loved ones have suffered, in the most complete of defenses (…) I appeal to your military honor, to your conscience, to your love for the institution. only one way: impunity can not be the epilogue of this national tragedy, only then, at that moment, will it ever be, as you and I desire. . "
Ana is expecting good winds for October while she looks at an image of the mural that Coas Chile Dedicated to him, a few days later the Supreme Court will grant parole to the detainees of Punta Peuco. And Ana, who will open this gate only the day the truth is known and justice is done, will not wait alone.
* Source: Public Word
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