Last September the people of Chile commemorated the 50th anniversary of the bloody, U.S.-backed coup d’état that changed the fate of their country and their lives on Sept. 11, 1973. There were hundreds of ceremonies and events; new documentaries were shown on television; commemorative concerts brought thousands of citizens together; and numerous new books on the coup appeared in bookstores.
The outpouring of debate about the past — the government of socialist leader Salvador Allende, the causes of the coup, and the repressive military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet that followed — reflects the efforts of Chileans to heal still-festering wounds. Individually and as a nation, Chileans are trying to repair the trauma of their past through an ongoing quest for truth, justice, and dignity.
Lily Meyer’s painful and provocative first novel, Short War, joins that community of discourse on the coup and its destructive impact on multiple generations of families whose existence was cruelly undermined and cut short by the CIA-supported overthrow of Allende and the advent of the Pinochet regime. In one way or another, her key characters continue to process the loss of dreams, loves, and life and grapple with the psychological costs of Chile’s socio-political catastrophe. Like the 1,100 Chileans who remain desaparecido — disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police — the connections and cohesiveness of the characters’ lives in Short War have also been desaparecido, with the inevitable traumatic consequences.
The book, published by Deep Vellum this year, is structured around three related narrators and three distinct narratives. Part 1 is titled “Crisis” — a reference to the looming plot that beset Chile in 1973, as Allende’s “peaceful road to socialism” began to unravel, abetted by clandestine CIA destabilization operations. The narrator is Gabriel Lazris, a 16-year-old American whose Jewish family has been living in Santiago for eight years. Gabriel is idealistic, curious, and committed to Allende’s socialist experiment. But from the opening sentence of the book, his point of view — and his heart — is focused on a smart and sophisticated teenage Chilena named Caro Ravest. Meyer deftly juxtaposes the passions and angsts of their teenage love with the dark storm of fear that gathered in the weeks before Chile’s 9/11.
Gabriel’s friends describe him as “the quiet American.” But we soon learn that Gabriel’s father, Ray, the Santiago bureau chief for a U.S. newspaper, is more of an ugly American — a CIA collaborator who spreads anti-Allende propaganda. In his father’s office Gabriel discovers a bottle of expensive Scotch with a note signed by “Winters.” It reads: “Appreciate all your help this year. Cheers to a less red 1972.” From embassy gatherings he has attended with his family, Gabriel knows Donald Winters as an attaché, but this note makes it clear that Winters is a CIA agent operating under diplomatic cover.
Donald Winters was a real person — the CIA’s deputy chief of station in Santiago. The author’s eye for such historical detail helps her to render the scenes in pre-coup Chile precisely and realistically, as if she had lived there herself a half century ago. Indeed, Meyer’s book includes an unusual addendum: a list of nonfiction books that helped her build the historical foundation to write it. “Short War is the result of nearly a decade of reading and research,” she writes. “I could not possibly have written it any other way.” (Full disclosure: my book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, is on Meyer’s list.)
The rest of the story is told by Gabriel’s two daughters, both of whom are living through the fallout of Chile’s tragedy. In Part 2, “Interpretation,” Meyer jumps her narrative forward more than 40 years. The interpreter is Gabriel’s daughter Nina, the only child of a failed marriage in the U.S. It’s 2015, and Nina is in Buenos Aires doing research on political violence. Her new Argentine boyfriend recommends she read a book titled Guerra Eterna — Eternal War — that, as Nina says, “punched holes in her personal history.”
Written in 1982 by an unknown Uruguayan author who uses a pseudonym and circulated underground through various communities of Latin American victims of repression, this book-within-a-book tells the story of a Chilean exile in Mexico named Manuela who had been detained, imprisoned, and tortured following the coup. She was arrested when she went to look for her American Jewish teenage boyfriend.
“His family was American. Their government would have spirited them home,” Nina reads in Guerra Eterna. “Manuela understood that but couldn’t accept it. She was in love. She was three months pregnant. She was only sixteen years old.” The book reveals to Nina a secret that her father has kept from her all her life: she has an older sister somewhere. Nina sets out on a quest to find her.
But that sister does not want to be found. Indeed, she has gone to great lengths to disappear herself. The final section of the book, “Decision,” is narrated by Ada Sophie Goldman, who lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, not far from her half-sister, Nina, who has come back to the U.S. with her Argentine husband. Ada’s pain, anger, and sense of loss and abandonment keep her from embracing the father and sister she knows she has. Decades after the coup, there is no closure for her.
And that is the case for Chile as a country. Meyer’s book is titled Short War — a reference to a toast that dates to World War II — but there is nothing short about the enduring remains of Chile’s past. Indeed, the point of Short War is that the personal and socio-political rectification of the crimes of a dictatorship is an internal — and eternal — struggle that continues to haunt its victims.
Peter Kornbluh directs the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.
An Enduring Short War
The event: Author Lily Meyer in conversation with Kim Sherwood
The time: Saturday, Aug. 10, 6 p.m.
The place: Davis event space at WOMR, 494 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $5 at Eventbrite.com
