Beyond truth and justice

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 33: Such Is Life
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Maria Tumarkin

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Maria Tumarkin’s biography and other articles by this writer

Francisco Cuadrado Prats, it turned out, was the grandson of General Carlos Prats, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, who resigned from his post in 1973 but not before heartily recommending his friend, Augusto Pinochet, as a replacement. After the military coup of 11 September 1973, Carlos Prats was forced into exile in Argentina and then blown up on a Buenos Aires street – together with his wife, as was the custom then – on the direct orders of his successor and good friend. When it happened, little Francisco was about to start school: a formative age, you may say.

In the coffin, Augusto Pinochet wore a blue Chilean army uniform, his allegiance to the military as the foremost institution of the state unambiguous even in his afterlife. The military, after all, brought him to power in 1973. The military ensured his amnesty. And now the military was burying him with enough pomp and ceremony to make everyone forget that the massive gathering was not – and, in 2006, could not be – a state funeral. Michelle Bachelet, the Chilean president at the time, was imprisoned under Pinochet, as were both her parents; her father, Air Force Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet, died in military custody from a heart attack brought on by torture.

Later in the funeral proceedings, in an unscheduled appearance defying military regulations (a captain in the Chilean army is forbidden from making political statements while in uniform), Captain Augusto Pinochet Molina burst into a speech defending his grandfather’s honour and legacy: ‘He was a man who at the height of the Cold War defeated the Marxist model, which tried to impose its totalitarian model not by vote, but more directly by force of arms.’

At the funeral the crowd parted for Pinochet’s grandson, but later that week he was expelled from the army. Shortly after, thousands of scam emails claiming to be written by Pinochet’s grandson were sent around the world: ‘I am now being dismissed from the Chilean army...and they want to collect our family fortune from me. I need your help to take care of this money.’ Whatever you say, these guys are on the ball.

Reflecting on the events of the funeral day, the Chilean-American writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman noted the extent to which the story of today’s Chile was ‘told by two grandsons of generals’. ‘For reconciliation to occur in Chile,’ Dorfman wrote, ‘the grandson of Carlos Prats would have to forget the death of his grandfather, renounce all desire for justice, betray the deepest sources of his wounded identity. Or the grandson of Augusto Pinochet would have to accept that his grandfather was a murderer and ask for forgiveness for the dead man’s actions.’ Neither of these grandsons will ever able to do this. This, Dorfman says, is where Chile is at.

Dorfman, who survived the coup (miraculously, he believes) and fled to the US, waited a long time for Pinochet to be brought to justice. To him, and to countless others in Chile and across the world, Pinochet’s death brought no relief. Coming before Pinochet was convicted for human rights abuses, it felt acutely like a defeat, a painful miscarriage of justice. ‘Both supporters and opponents of Pinochet had reasons to wish he was still alive,’ noted Jonathan Franklin in The Guardian. Supporters wanted Pinochet to be immortal. Opponents wanted him to be held accountable for his crimes, for justice to beat mortality to the punch.

A FEW YEARS after Augusto Pinochet Molina rose to his feet at his grandfather’s funeral, the grandson of another dead general – of a dead Generalissimus, in fact – was suing for defamation. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s grandson, was claiming that the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta (for which the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskya had worked) should be held accountable for its claims that his grandfather was a mass murderer. Yevgeny Dzhugashvili told journalists he felt compelled to intervene because his grandfather (not unlike the grandfather of Augusto Pinochet Molina) could not ‘defend himself from his grave’. In Captain Molina’s speech at his grandfather’s funeral, he lauded his grandfather’s victory over the Marxist totalitarianism of the kind Yevgeny Dzhugashvili’s grandfather had taken to its apotheosis, yet somehow, two generations down, Augusto and Yevgeny found themselves on the same side of the barricades.

Today there exists a curious preponderance of renegade grandsons of the dead dictators (granddaughters are also there but not quite in force, it seems). The grandson of the Spanish dictator General Franco was recently in the news, accused of pulling out a revolver and firing four shots at another driver at a roundabout near Madrid. Mussolini’s grandson is also out there, still looking for the elusive truth about the circumstances of his grandfather’s death, in 1945.

Even though the twentieth-century dictators may seem like ghosts to us now, farcical more than dangerous, shadowy more than real, their grandsons point to a peculiar historical condition of our time. Ours is a world where the unravelling of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes in Europe and Latin America has produced a host of societies in which the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of ‘victims and tormentors live side by side, drink at the same bars, eat at the same restaurants, jostle each other on buses and streets’, as Ariel Dorfman puts it. Perhaps this condition won’t seem so peculiar when we begin to confront the intergenerational legacy of more recent outbreaks of large-scale violence – in post-apartheid South Africa, in post-genocidal Rwanda and Bosnia – where at least some of the victims and perpetrators, as well as their children and grandchildren, are condemned, for what may seem like an eternity, to walk the same streets.