HEART ATTACK

... when the old man looked into my eyes and asked me ... so ... tell me ... if really you are a man ... with a heart ... how can you kill an other person only because he has a different idea from yours? ... my mind got completely blind ... my eyes got wet ... I almost cried ... I looked at his eyes ... and in that moment I was sure ... that he knew people who were killed by them ... by the ... death squads ... that the Pinochet regime created after the 1973 coup ... I didn't have the heart to ask him if my feeling was right ... I didn't want to see that old man cry. That was the first time that I found a Chilean willing to speak about the Pinochet era ... I didn't know if I had to be glad that I had finally the chance to speak about this topic with a person who lived it ... or feel guilty because in some way I forced him to remember such painful moment. One week later ... I wasn't able to stop those tears ... and I cried ... I cried hard ... so hard that I wasn't able to speak for several minutes ... it did happen ... after I finish to watch with a friend ... the movie Machuca (the story of two Chilean youngsters who are living the 1973 Pinochet coup) ... and I tried to explain her what I knew about the coup and the horrible crimes of the Pinochet era ... so ... I explain her ... what I knew about the desaparecidos ... and I tried to give her examples ... telling her ... what I read ... that for example ... has been proven that ... when the death squads arrested communist ... if they among them ... they had pregnant women close to deliver ... they were basically ... making them deliver and after that ... before killing the mom ... they were telling to the mom that the kid was going to be given to a family ... with the right anticommunist values ... so that kid was going to grow up in a family that was going to teach him / her ... that a good communist is only a dead communist ... and believe me ... even now ... picturing such a situation in my head ... almost makes me cry again. And when I went to Santiago, Chile and I saw La Moneda ... the presidential palace ...... that was half destroyed by the bombs dropped by the airplanes during the 1973 coup ... and where the elected president Salvador Allende found his death ... I finally ... understood ... you can't do these things if you have a soul and a heart. So today ... when I read that Pinochet died ... because of a heart attack ... I didn't open any bottle of Champagne ... but I thought that is was a paradox ... that a person without a soul could die ... and that a person without a heart could die because of a heart attack ... yep ... today ... December 10th 2006 ... a man without heart ... died for a heart attack ...