Exiled Chileans celebrate ...

Press, 26 September 1980, Page 13

Exiled Chileans celebrate ...

By

EION SCOTT,

a member of the

University of Canterbury post-gradiiate course in journalism.

Laws, are relaxed during the Ramada festival in Chile, so that Chileans can dance and drink in the streets, without fear of imprisonment. Festivities take place. in the three days around the Chilean National Day: •September 18. On the last, the day of the armed forces, the streets : of Santiago: are filled with tanks, the skies with aircraft . .. The people are sobered by the exhibition of the force which overthrew the Allende government in 1973. Some of the Chilean refugees, forced into exile when General Pinochet brought his military junta to power, celebrated their national day in a Colombo Street home last week-end.

Instead of the traditional beef and goat meat, these Chileans roasted marinated lamb chops over glowing coals, and saluted each other with New Zealand beer as well as their more customary apple wine. They are members of the Latin Andino dance troupe, who entertain New Zealand audiences with folk songs and dances so that they can send money back to relatives and friends left behind in Chile, through the Vicaria Church.

Raul Salazar is one member of the troupe who left Chile after the 1973 coup d’etat. He was work*ing as a journalist when

the Allende Government was overthrown. Now he is living and working in Woolston.

Raul will not. allow his reasons for leaving Chile, nor how he set about it, to be published. The .risk is too great of' repercussions on his family still.: But he can tell the. story of Chile’s most famous escaper; whom he met while in exile in Peru. Raul used ‘to call him “Pavo,” which is Spanish for "stowaway,” : but his real name is-Mario Grez.

Grez was too poor to go to school. He was too poor to buy an air ticket out of Chile, and with the military junta under General Pinochet in power, there was no chance of getting a passport.

The chances of his leaving Chile were so low that his own wife thought he was joking when he told her. But Grez was desperate; he knew it was only a matter of time before the police caught up with him and tortured him for being a supporter of Allende. One night, he waited as an aircraft taxied ?up to one end of Santiago airport. As it stopped to build up engine power, he jumped inside the undercarriage compartment. Sitting astride one of the wheel struts, he clung to the bar above him, gripping desperately to stop himself being sucked out as the plane took off.

The undercarriage was raised and the hot spinning wheel stopped millimetres away from the stowaway’s chest. As the aircraft climbed the air grew colder and thinner. He was sbon suffering from oxygen loss, and his fingers froze on to the bar above him. He lost consciousness. not know how long the 'flight lasted,' . nor where it was. headed, and he came to only as the aircraft was landing. Safe-

ly •on the ground, Grez needed only to reach out and touch the refuelling attendant. But his hands were frozen solid to the bar. He tried to call out but his lips were frozen together. **

Desperate for freedom, he ripped his hands free, leaving his skin on the bar, and fell to the runway tarmac. It was one o’clock in the morning. The lights that flooded him were those of Lima airport. Grez had escaped from Chile after a three hour flight. The United- Nations Commission for Refugees helped get his wife and. family out of Chile and flew them to a new life in England. But although he

found his freedom, he lost his sanity.

■ Raul says that the flight mentally unbalanced Grez, so that during celebrations for the Chilean National Day, he tried to commit suicide. Raul had to pull him from the second-stor-ey window ledge of a house they shared in Peru. His hands were gripping the curtain rail above him; he screamed that his singlet was choking him.Raul thinks he was reliving his escape.

Raul also tells the storyof Victor Jara, a popular Chilean singer who was entertaining the Santiago University students on the day of the overthrow — September 11, 1973. When the Army attacked the capital, bombing La Moneda Palace where Allende was delivering a speech, the soldiers were ordered to. arrest anyone found in a likely centre of resistance.

The university was one of these, and Jara was one of the detainees who were herded in their droves into the national football stadium.

Because his face was made famous by his songs for the Chilean workers, students and teachers, Jara was singled out of the crowd and tortured by the soldiers. As Raul says: “They didn’t like him singing to the poor people, so they made him sing to them, as they beat him to death •in the changing rooms.”

Before the coup, Raul was a reporter for a workers’, radio in a mining town the size of Rangipra. He interviewed many important people, but the person who impressed him most was Cuban premier, Dr Fidel Castro. Castro toured the country in 1972 at the invitation of Dr Salvadore Allende. Like the Chilean leader, Raul became a friend and fervent admirer of the Cuban revolutionary.

He describes Castro’s reaction to being given first-class accommodation during his stay: "Castro talked to people as if they were old friends—like you and I are talking now — so when they put him in the house where the

Yankies used to stay, he said: ‘Are you treating me like a king or an emperor? I am one of the people’.” When Raul Salazar came to New Zealand in 1975, he found two major problems: learning the language and finding a job. His only English had been learned in high school in Chile. He had become a reporter straight from school, so had no other, qualifications for getting a job in New Zealand. He was given work at Bowron’s Tannery in Woolston and is now completing a three-year course in leather technology. He receives ‘ correspondence from the Leather and Shoes. Research Association, and this helps him-, to improve his English. “I was used to working with a typewriter and tape recorder, but when I came here it was quite a change having to work with leather,” he says. He finds the economy of New Zealand quite different from that of .his birthplace. “The rich men in. Chile are much richer than those in New Zealand.- But the poor are very much poorer.”

He quotes a Chilean advertisement for a 20 metre by 30 metre section in Santiago, priced at $220,000. The average salary for a 48-hour week in Chile is only $2200 a year. And those who cannot get full employment, or any employment at all, as is the case with 20 per cent of the work force, are forced to live in the poblacion — the Chilean equivalent of the ghetto. “The official inflation rate is ’ 13 per cent — what a joke,” says Raul. “I believe they’re bringing itdown, but they’re doing it at too much social cost.”

Raul sees Chile’s changes of government sjrmbolised by what happened to a fence built -between the two swimming pools in his' home “ town. “Before 1970, there were two ' swimming-’ pools —- one for the Yankies and one for the'Chileans. My brother tried to . jump the fence once, and was taken to the police station.” As soon as - Allende brought the Western world’s first Marxist government to power, he introduced legislation which nationalised all of Chile’s mining industries. He compensated the American companies - which lost the mines, and allayed fears of a Communist take-over

by promising continued freedom of speech, and continuance of a multiparty political system. “The first thing Allende did was remove the fence — and so the socialist influence there was good,” Raul says.

But both the Chilean professional class and the American multi-national companies disagreed. One year after Allende’s overthrow, President Ford disclosed that the C.EA. had poured millions of dollars into the parties and news media opposed to Allende, and so undermined the stability of the Chilean government.

Strikes by: shop owners, truck owner-drivers and professional workers crippled the country, and Washington sources later claimed that Nixon knew of . the coup 48 hours before it began. “Now,” says Raul, “there is no reason to believe that the fence isn't back again.” But he is no more sympathetic. towards Communist states. “You could say that I’m a self-confessed Communist,” he says “but I don’t agree with them either. Russia has got some good socialist ideas, but I don’t like some of the. things they do there.

“China is even worse. They call themselves Communists, but,China was one of the first countries to recognise the junta. And during the coup, they didn’t allow anyone to find safety inside their embassy’s doors.”

Raul is- half Indian and half Spanish by ancestry. His daughter, Tania, is half Chilean and half New Zealand. She is one of four New Zealand-born children in the “Latin Andinos”.

The troupe performed in the Trade Union Centre on May Day this year to celebrate the Chilean Working People’s Day. In the audience was Isabel Allende, daughter of the late Chilean leader, who was here to enlist support for the political refugees still trapped in Chile. Raul proudly displays a photograph taken when she met the troupe. It reminds him of a country that he dearly loves. “New Zealand has given me everything, given me a trade and a family. But it is not home. I’d like to go back to Chile. But it is‘ impossible . at least for the time being.”- - > . -