Guerrero Senior must have recognized the place he was brought to on March 29, 1985. From the school, he and Parada were transported to a facility called La Firma, where Weibel Senior also ended up on a different March 29, in 1976. Guerrero Senior had been there around the same time, and survived. The man who tortured people says that he took part in that earlier detention as well. The man who tortured people says that Manuel Guerrero was picked up in Departamental and then taken to La Firma. With a feeling of déjà vu, Guerrero must have remembered that previous detention and his stay at La Firma in 1976. Having been there before in the hands of the same people, he may have thought he’d be better at surviving it this time. Having gotten out once, maybe he thought he could get out again. But the twilight zone stopwatch is remorseless. No matter the year or the day, its tiny hands keep time locked up inside it, revolving around itself, advancing backward, retreating forward, inevitably ending up in the same spot, that place beyond rescue distance where José Weibel landed, and then Guerrero, Parada, and Nattino, eleven years later. The strange thread of coincidences running through these two stories of kidnappings, children, parents, and death runs through everything from that time, I believe, and it stitches us here, on this street corner where we’re taking part in a commemoration.
A group of children is singing on stage. They’re out of tune, and they start over. In the crowd across the street, I see my friend X and her little girl L. I also spot F and his mother, who got chairs and are now listening in comfort, while at the back I think I see little S on the shoulders of her father, N. Circling the stage with their cameras, my documentarian friends are filming, working on a movie about Guerrero Junior. There are many familiar faces on this corner. I could name H, R, C, E, a whole alphabet, the full roster of a class, meeting here tonight. Several I don’t even known by name, but I recognize them from other ceremonies like this, other vigils, old marches, their faces stuck in my faulty memory just like this dumb song I can’t get out of my head.
We didn’t start the fire, no we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.
The man who tortured people says he doesn’t regret having talked. The man who tortured people says he doesn’t regret turning up at the reporter’s office that August morning so long ago. Since then, his life hasn’t been easy. Hidden away in his French refuge, he’s been besieged by rats and ravens. I know that in France he’s met with many people. I know Sécurité has transported him to Paris each time anyone requested his testimony. He has arranged meeting times, trips, secret appointments. I know that he has spotted enemies, I know that more than once he’s had to flee, victim of paranoia or real persecution. I know that he has continued to identify photographs. I know he’s met with lawyers, judges, victims’ family members. He even returned to Chile to testify in court not long ago. Which means that for thirty years, his dedication to bearing witness has been unwavering. Despite the fear, the paranoia, and the distance, he’d do the same thing all over again, he says. If time went mad the way it did back then and stopped and turned backward, putting him in the same situation, he’d do it again.
But there is one thing that troubles his conscience about the testimony he gave, he says. Something he’d try to change or handle more carefully to prevent collateral damage. He’d try to keep the thread on which he strung his words from getting tangled up in the names of Parada, Guerrero, and Nattino.
Parada’s daughter and Guerrero’s son take the stage. She looks a lot like her father; he looks like his. Both of them thank the memorial project on behalf of their families. The organizers are a collective of young people who probably weren’t even born when it all happened. Guerrero Junior reads a letter that his own daughter sent from Europe, where she’s in school. It’s a message for everyone, because she doesn’t want to be absent despite the distance. She talks about the legacy that ties her to this corner and about the challenge of keeping memory alive. As Guerrero Junior reads the letter, I think that this memorial and this whole ceremony are for her. Not for her grandfather and his friends, not for her parents, not for us, but for her and for the children in the choir. For Weibel Junior’s children. For L, X’s little girl. For S who is watching it all from N’s shoulders. For my own son, who isn’t with me today, tired of tagging along to memorials like this one.
While the man who tortured people was speaking with the reporter, the reporter knew the information was extremely delicate. Which is why she decided to confirm every tiny detail of his testimony before it was published. So she contacted her friend José Manuel Parada, fellow Communist Party member and manager of the Vicariate of Solidarity’s Department of Documentation and Archives. He was the best person to help her analyze the interview material because he knew more than almost anybody about the apparatus of repression. Every day, José Manuel Parada received accounts of kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and other abuses. He suggested bringing in Manuel Guerrero, whom he trusted implicitly and who could triangulate the
