Latin Driving

One of my favorite Latin American movies is called The Official Story or La historia oficial. It's about a rich white family in Argentina that's coming to grips with the truth about their adopted 5-year-old daughter. Turns out she was actually stolen from two young political prisoners who were later tortured and killed by the Argentinean military junta of the late 70's and early 80's.

Whoops.

So the wife, a conservative high school history teacher, is starting to open her eyes, face the facts and - one thing leads to another - she begins actively looking for the family, the grandparents of her child.

Her husband, though, is an influential attorney highly connected to the higher ups in the military elite. He's rigidly in denial, and thus we get the exciting conflict that makes this story so great. I recommend that you watch this movie. Rent it, or even easier pick up a copy online. It's amazing.

There's one scene, in particular, that really sucked me in. It's the one where he's rushing to the airport en route to some important summit and his wife is following him there, pleading for him to acknowledge the truth about their daughter.

What I like is the way his motorcade pulls in to the airport, a chain of dark gray cars driving ridiculously fast. It's about to turn into a five car pile up. But just in the nick of time each car lurches to a halt right before the hitting the one in front of it, screeching and swaying like a depraved suicide attempt cut short, the victim making it abundantly clear, however, where he'd rather be.

It's not playful, like the traffic I saw when I traveled to Egypt. In Cairo, the cars wind and zigzag mischievously throughout the street, and sometimes the sidewalk, practically dancing to the clapping ululations of their beloved pop stars like Amr Diab.

In Chile, however, it's more like the movie. It's dark, frightening and nonchalant. It's spooky-dooky fast. Walking around Santiago, I'm kinda scared to cross the street sometimes. Halfway through crossing I often turn to see huge screaming busses barreling towards me. Silent red, silver Peugeots, Hondas, black taxis darting silently towards me like bullets, moving at incredible speeds.

And then it hits me (not a car, but a sensation) that these drivers seem to pull something along with them, more than themselves -- like the way a Shaman's drum beat is said to energize the brain so that it's awakened to a state of higher consciousness. These cars, in turn, drag this wild and electronic whirrrrrrrrrring through the cerebral cortex, the mind wakes up, eyes snap wild open and the field of vision points starkly inward -- dark, dreamlike and bizarre.

Fast driving is so juvenile. That's why I love it. It seems to be all about finding bliss through total concentration, powered on by a hypnotic piston beat surging with a feeling of going somewhere. I really am going somewhere, but it's not really "forward."

I mean, the thrill of speeding along has never really made me feel like I'm jetting into the future. It's not a feeling of progress (after all, progress isn't a kid's thing). It's exhilarating, but as any physicist would tell you, time is technically slowing down. So it's kinda like Rousseau's wonderful theory on education: the ideal of childhood is losing time. The faster I go, the closer I get to the elusive present moment.

But something about the drivers in Santiago, Chile -- they seem to hit that present moment, grab it and run it 20 years into the past. Or 30 years. Surrounded by high speed traffic it feels like I'm stuck in 1980, before I was born. Maybe it's not even the cars, but the architecture -- endless grayness, piles of cement jerking and ambling along for miles. I see it from out my 8th floor window or from vista points like Cerro Santa Lucia.

It's a good thing I like history. But then again, slightly similar to Argentina although completely unique to Chile, much of the recent history here horrifying. In a word, Pinochet.
Or, if you prefer, Nixon.

It's so bad that the most bizarrely realistic pleas of the artists here is to fervently wish that what happened here had never happened. Ever. Watch the documentary Salvador Allende by Patricio Guzman. I watched it, and saw a lucid illustration of how Chile began to suffer savage bleeding wound (which would end up with real life concentration camps in the mid 1970's) -- but how there was really no good reason for it.

One problem, though, is that many people prefer to cover up the past. Others, more in tune with reality, choose to "wish it never happened." This option seems to be about the best there is. To acknowledge the truth (like 7,000 thrown into the National Stadium Sept 12, 1973, to be shot and tortured) but not to accept it. To know that it really did happen, that it won't go away, but still to pray hard and fervently that someone could undo it all, rewind the past, drive really really fast and make it all go away.

To learn more about a current documentary covering Chile concentration camp legacy, visit The Chacabuco Project, the fundraising effort for the upcoming film Chacabuco; the Desert's Skin

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