Alicia Pastore is one of thousands of Chileans scarred by a brutal dictatorship’s tortures and murders.
By Fr. Bob Mosher

Alicia Pastore in her Santiago, Chile, home from where her husband disappeared more than 30 years ago.

Alicia Pastore, well into her sixties now, invited me to sit in the tiny living room of her home in Santiago, Chile. Squeezed into the room with a couch and two chairs, a coffee table neatly held the photographs of a family’s life history. It’s a history sliced into a before and an after, by the arrest and subsequent disappearance of Alicia’s husband, Ofelio, on Friday, July 30, 1974.

July 30 was a Tuesday that year, and it had hardly begun at 1 o’clock that morning when an Army soldier dressed for war and four men in civilian clothes beat roughly on the front gate of this same house in a working-class area of Santiago. Alicia didn’t want to wake the children, but the older ones, Hugo and Veronica, heard everything from their beds and didn’t stir. Two-year-old Ruth slept peacefully.

One of the civilians, a member of the secret police, told Alicia as Ofelio was led away, “In five days, look for your husband at the offices of the Ministry of the Interior.” Shutting the gate behind the civilians, she saw another young man in the red car waiting outside, obviously another arrest during the early days of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.

Alicia didn’t wait five days. She kept her children home from school that day. Her sister arrived from another part of the city, and together they began a journey of thousands of days, looking for her 42-year-old husband in offices, prisons, hospitals and military facilities. At first, the officials made fun of her and joked.

“You should be happy he’s gone! He’s out of your life! Get hitched up with someone else now!” They implied that Alicia’s husband had left the country, perhaps with another woman. After months went by, some of the officials began to become impatient and refused to let her into their reception areas.
The newspapers, restricted by the Pinochet dictatorship, printed a bogus story not long afterwards in which her husband’s name appeared. A large group of revolutionaries, the story reported, shot at another group of revolutionaries in neighboring Argentina.

Everyone was killed; 119 people in total. They happened to be the first people to disappear during the Pinochet dictatorship. They weren’t to be the last. More than 3,000 people are estimated to have gone missing during the Pinochet dictatorship.

The story’s veracity didn’t last long. Obviously, the military regime that violently took power on September 11, 1973, wanted this bothersome issue of “the arrested-missing” (detenidos-desaparecidos) to go away.

Righting A Dictatorship’s Wrongs
Reconciliation in Chile, after the divisive injustices of Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, depends upon the establishment of truth and justice in every case of disappearance and abuse of basic human rights.

The Catholic Church began its work for reconciliation during this same dark period, establishing the Vicariate of Solidarity to detail the facts of the numerous disappearances and daily abuses—such as torture, exile, deportation, threats and wiretaps—committed by agents of the state.

The lawyers and doctors and other specialists who worked for the Vicariate of Solidarity wrote up the legal writs, attended to the relatives of the missing—now in dire economic straits—and published what it could under the censorship rules of the time. Other Churches and religious bodies, inside and outside Chile, helped finance this tremendous operation of accountability.

But the arrival of democracy in Chile hasn’t entirely allowed the truth to emerge, nor does justice seem at hand. Alicia still knows nothing about who arrested her husband, where he was taken, what he suffered and whether those responsible will face the consequences of their actions.

About seven years ago, Alicia and her children decided they would admit that Ofelio was, indeed, dead—a big emotional and legal step. They would no longer hold out hope. Still, with no body, no funeral, and no one held to account for what happened, there is no closure.

“It’s still an open wound,” Alicia tells me quietly. “Fresh, bleeding, constant.”

We had a cup of tea with her daughter, Ruth, now grown and with a 10-year-old daughter of her own, but Ruth didn’t want to stay for the conversation.

She has never forgotten that Alicia never woke her that night 30 years before and harbors deep anger about the absence in her life of a loving and protective father.

Ruth works in a small hospital in Santiago, and the staff and patients all love her concern and fierce compassion for the sick. But she cannot speak easily of her father or her pain.

Alicia’s other daughter, Veronica, died of cystic fibrosis last year.

The long, bleak trail has transformed Alicia from a gentle, quiet woman into a brave and prophetic figure forced into confrontations with the dictatorship’s stubbornly silent and uncaring authorities. As we talked, Alicia went into an adjoining room and returned, carrying a small, ceramic figurine.

Veronica made the figurine and gave it to a friend of the family. Veronica instructed the friend to give it to her mother after she died. Alicia received it a few months ago and, with difficulty, keeps back her tears while showing it to me.

“Ruth hasn’t seen this yet,” she confided. “It expresses what Veronica had longed for all these years: the embrace of a father.”

We sat quietly for a few moments, contemplating the figure. “I’ll show it to Ruth and Hugo (Alicia’s son) and his family this weekend when we come together to celebrate my husband’s life.”

Letting Go Of Anger
Alicia has had a difficult time adhering to Christian teachings of forgiveness and love for one’s enemies. But she began the process of dealing with her life as a fervent Catholic and follower of Jesus Christ while also being a victim of a vast injustice. She had realized that she did not want others to suffer what she did—not even the perpetrators of this crime.

Whatever other feelings of anger and hurt she might have to deal with, she knew that she could take the giant step of not wanting anyone to experience the pain she knew and to let go of the passion for vengeance that could understandably inflame anyone in this same situation.

Over the years, Alicia found she could begin her own growth in reconciliation, in small ways that were nevertheless important: She no longer got off the bus if uniformed policemen got on; she can go up to a soldier and enter into a friendly conversation; she can talk to people about her pain and history, even people she knew were supporters of the military regime responsible for her husband’s disappearance.

But there is still the open wound of the unresolved injustice, and her daughter is not the only relative of the arrested-missing to arrive at the end of her earthly existence without knowing what happened, without seeing satisfying justice, without a funeral for the remains of a loved one.

Other wives, mothers and fathers also find the clock running out for them without resolution of their grief and loss. The numbers of the arrested-missing are in the thousands, and thousands more await a true reconciliation with the rest of their people over these crimes.

No Justice, No Peace
A dozen or so military officers are now imprisoned, and the current government, the third after democracy was restored in 1990, is slowly working to investigate and win cooperation from the military for the many cases still pending.

But in Chile, reconciliation will always be a distant, ideal world as long as Alicia, Ruth and future generations live in uncertainty, distress and pain. Without justice, how can there be peace for anyone?

Fr. Bob Mosher is from Massachusetts and has worked in Chile for more than 20 years. He currently heads the Mission Services Center in Santiago, Chile’s capital.