Alicia and her husband were good, practicing Catholics, in a working-class residential area of Chile’s capital city, Santiago, where the Columbans administered a parish, San Gabriel.
She helped lead the weekly meetings of the parents of children preparing to receive their First Holy Communion, gatherings that met for two years, and her husband was inspired by the social teachings of the Church to become a leader of a local trade union. Her husband and other members of the union would collectively bargain for decent wages and safe working conditions from their employers.
Neither of them were prepared for the military forces to violently take over the government, and begin arresting people who might oppose them, in September of 1973, but a few months into the dictatorship of General Pinochet, a group of soldiers arrived at their doorstep and took Alicia’s husband away. It was just after two in the morning.
She never saw him again.
Over the weeks, months and years that followed her husband’s arrest, none of the personnel at any base, government office or hospital recognized the name of her husband. The morgues didn’t either, when she was finally moved to look for his body there.
To add insult to injury, the soldiers and officers at the entrances to military facilities began to tire of her entreaties for any information about her husband, and would dismiss her with brazen ridicule, suggesting that her husband had fled over the border and was living in Argentina with a new wife and family.
They treated hundreds of families, also looking for their missing loved ones after their arrests, in the same way. At one point, the junta even promoted a story about a massacre in neighboring Argentina, where most of the arrested had disappeared to and had supposedly died, fighting one another in some kind of internal dispute among the supposed enemies of the military regime. It was an attempt to make the whole affair go away.
Fortunately, the Church stepped in and established a Vicariate of Solidarity, which provided lawyers, social workers, medical personnel and aid to the families of the disappeared, and other victims of the violence of the dictatorship. The Church helped them establish soup kitchens and folkcraft workshops, publishing its own monthly review of the human rights situation in the country (distributed through the parishes) as well as nine tomes listing the details and backgrounds of every missing person who was last seen being arrested by state security forces, including the circumstances of the removal of Alicia’s husband from their home.
One could see how her normally quiet, cheerful personality and faith-filled demeanor changed in the face of the blatant brutality and violence of the dictatorship.
Alicia struggled with her own bitterness and anger. One could see how her normally quiet, cheerful personality and faith-filled demeanor changed in the face of the blatant brutality and violence of the dictatorship. Not used to speaking out, or assertively expressing her own opinions, she now learned how to insist and demand answers of those responsible for her husband’s disappearance, joining others in organized demonstrations for truth and justice, and becoming a beloved member of the Agrupación, the organization that the relatives of the arrested-missing founded for themselves and their mutual support.
She also knew Jesus’ teachings, and example, very well. As a disciple of Jesus Christ and faithful Catholic, she felt sadness and guilt over her inability to forgive those who took her husband away.
If a uniformed person got on the bus she took to work, she would get off at the next stop, unable to bear being on the same means of transport. She understood very well the chants and the passion of some of her colleagues in the Agrupación, who firmly held to the slogan, “Neither forgiveness nor forgetting” about the past — Ni perdón ni olvido!!
She, too, experienced the same kind of anger at the violent crime she and her daughter were victims of—an event that of its nature could never provide the healing closure of at least seeing the body, or providing a funeral to offer him, or even the essential knowledge of what happened to her husband. She would never be allowed to grieve over what was left of her husband, and move on in life.
“But, how could she call herself a Christian?,” she asked herself. She just couldn’t accept forgiving those who took her husband away into oblivion.
She shared her inner struggle with several of us Columbans over the years. And then, a light came into her life, a new perspective, that opened the door to a happier existence, without requiring her to give up on the search for her husband, nor cease her demands for accountability, in truth and justice, with others like her in the Agrupación.
In fact, nowhere in the Bible, in either Testament, is there any command to “forgive and forget.” “Forget about the past” is not a value in the Judeo-Christian tradition, while remembering the past, on the other hand, is central to the history of salvation that it describes for us, and through which God speaks to us in His saving Word.
But there was something else she could do. Despite the need for accountability and justice, both for her and for the country, there was something else she could cling to, to be authentically faithful to Christ’s teaching to forgive one’s enemies, and to do good to those who harm you (Luke 6:27-28).
She knew that she could not wish anyone else to suffer what she had gone through, no matter who they were.
The question that came to her put the whole situation into a new light. When she considered how much she and her daughter had suffered, from the very first night of the abduction, for years afterwards, she then asked herself, “Would I want the families of those responsible for this crime to suffer as I have, as my daughter has?”
She had to say no, she didn’t. No matter how heinous the violence done to her husband, her daughter, her own person, she was not capable of wishing the same thing to happen to her worst enemies. It was too much for anyone to go through. She was not like the perpetrators of violence. She knew that she could not wish anyone else to suffer what she had gone through, no matter who they were.
And that turned out to be the beginning of healing, in her life as a follower of Christ. Over time, she would no longer step off a means of public transport whenever a uniformed person stepped on. She no longer crossed the street to avoid members of the police. On the national day of celebrating the national police force, called carabineros, she finally was able to stop a policeman in uniform, shake his hand, and thank him for his service to the country.
When Alicia died two years ago, she was still working with the Agrupación, who had been recognized by the governments that were elected after the return of the democratic system of government, and civilian control. Monetary compensation had been proposed to resolve the situation by an investigative committee set up by the government, but the struggle to find out the truth and bring those responsible to justice continues to this day, sometimes eking out results, but never abandoned.
I was moved to see the photograph of a smiling Alicia, sitting at an information table with others, the picture of her husband pinned to her blouse, published next to her obituary on the information website of the Agrupación. She kept up the struggle to the end of her life, but found a measure of healing and joy in her life of faith, before passing over into everlasting freedom, and into the presence of the Paschal victory of Christ, and the New Life of God’s Reign.
Columban Father Robert Mosher lived and worked in Chile from 1980 through 2009 and is presently assigned to Saint Columban’s Residence for retired priests of the Mission Society of St. Columban, in Bristol, Rhode Island.