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Chacabuco

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I'm thinking of a picture postcard of the Port of Antofogasta. I found it at one of those used books and stands in Providencia, Santiago. In the picture there were no palm trees. Not much of anything, just white sand and blue ocean. 850 miles north of Santiago de Chile, Antofogasta is where the ocean meets the Atacama Desert, the dryest piece of land on the planet, parts of which haven't seen a drop of rain since they started recording rain.

North from the port city and inland into the loneliness of the desert, there's a series of old mining towns, abandoned, relics of Chile's fiesta years, the 1930's nitrate boom. People take tours of them, but many are in serious disrepair. One of them is called Chacabuco.

It's a ghost town right off the PanAmerican Highway 5. Although the town is abandoned, truck drivers who take that route at night talk about seeing the town lit up, thousands of miners at work.

It's surrounded by landmines, many unaccounted for. That's because in 1973 and 1974 it was a concentration camp. Pinochet used mines to keep the prisoners from escaping.

In the early 1990's, one of the prisoners decided to move back. Roberto Zaldivar says that Chacabuco is the Cross that Chile must bear, and has dedicated his life to preserving its memory.

In its days as a prison camp, Chacabuco housed mostly artists and intellectuals -- those who presented a political or cultural threat to the military dictatorship. Aside from psychological trauma (false executions) and the militaristic nature of the place, the prisoners were often left to their own and allowed to make music, write poetry, put on plays in the local theater and even play soccer with the guards.

As far as life in a concentration camp goes, Chacabuco was palatable. As far as location goes, Chacabuco was perfect. Nobody in his right mind would attempt escape into that desert -- even without the landmines there. Chile had no access to these people.

We're going to Chacabuco at the end of May. Niles is filming a 30-minute documentary entitled Chacabuco: The Desert's Skin. We're going to find this man, then turn the cameras on.

Niles is also filming Chacabuco prison camp survivors here in Santiago, he's got a couple interviews lined up this week. His last interview yielded some pretty interesting stuff. According to one ex-prisoner, Chacabuco was a city of light...compared to the post-coup attrocities in the National Stadium.