We have such a pathetically short attention span here in the USA, that we desperately & constantly need to be reminded of the horrors & anguish our right-wingers so eagerly helped to inflict on the rest of the world.

I'm old enough to remember the overthrow of Allende, and the smarmy, self-righteous, self-serving blather of Kissinger & his ilk. And weren't some of GWB's cronies & enablers working their same evil for Richard Nixon back then?

I hope & pray, against all reasonable hope, that at least some of them will be brought to justice someday. The odds are against it, I know. Year after year, decade after decade, we see these people appearing on TV & treated like sage statesmen by the fawning media. They pontificate, chuckle at their little jokes -- and all the evil they help perpetrate is forgotten, ignored. And if anyone should mention it, that's what the media considers bad taste, bad manners, bad form. How dare we bring up all that blood & torture & murder to those responsible for it?

I sometimes despair ... so thank you, Ariel Dorfman, and all those who continue to keep memory & truth alive.

BBC Four in the UK showed what seems, from the description in the article, to be this film under the title "Somebody Had To Live".

Like Tim Lukeman I am old enough to remember 1973 and, sadly, have to say the majority of UK Subjects have the same short attention span regarding the past.

Thank you Ariel for both the article, the film, and as Tim states for keeping 'memory & truth alive'

Wow, that was an interesting piece. It's going to occupy my thoughts for awhile.

America has forgotten the horrors we unleashed on Latin America (not to mention SE Asia) in the name of anti-Communism. Our collective amnesia has begotten more abject human misery in Iraq and now threatens even more carnage in Iran.

If there was any justice, Henry Kissinger would be rotting-away in a cell in the Hague for crimes against humanity instead of being celebrated as an "elder statesman" on American TV chat shows.

Is it indicative of our country's failure to take responsibility for the crimes committed in our name in Latin America that only four letters were posted on this article? Is that all the interest that can be generated about our complicity in assasinating Allende? Or about our foriegn policy in El Salvador, Guatamala, and Nicarauga in the 1980s? I understand that taking responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths down there is no simple matter. But we need to understand the tremendous damage done by our unfettered resort to violence so that we hold ourselves accountable for wars such as that in Iraq.

I was very sorry to learn of what happened to your grandmother's / grandparents remains.

I recently saw a travelogue by Steeve Reeves, the travel-tour-guide-professional, which showed that in parts of Europe a grave plot is rented and after 12 years if the surviving family members do not keep up payments, the grave plot is re-assigned.

I am grateful that where I live a prescient man developed a garden cemetery where people, including myself, can be buried (as my cremated remains will be buried) in perpetuity, and the very green landscape, fed by a sprinklers from a nearby river, have space for accomodation for the next 500 years.

Nowadays one can not only prepay (prepayment is always cheaper) for a burial site and funeral services, one can also preselect the tombstone, or bench or marker and preselect the inscription. Your name and year of birth are placed on the marker and the marker is often installed - and upon death the year of death is added. All this preselection means that the choice is personal, it is ours and not left to bereaved family at the time of death trying to make decisions about what we would like.

I have dealt with the practical matters of a person's physical remains above, but I want to celebrate your grandmother's life and the love she gave to you. Her love will never die no matter where she was laid to rest and later relocated. And, i feel that your grandmother knows of your love and knows that you went to visit her gravesite. How wonderful that your son accompanied you on this journey to your past to visit your grandmother. They are both precious relationships - with grandmother, with son.

As for your brave and courageous rescuer, she brightened my day to know she cared so much for another human being that she risked her life. I am so glad you were able to have a personal reunion. It is an inspiring story which I will remember.

Blessings.

Beautiful. As anyone (or everyone) from a dysfunctional family knows, peace is complicated, tenuous, and precious. I hope that traveling through your past brought you peace, Señor Dorfman.

Dorfman's account of the persistence of authoritarian insanity long after its progenitors are gone should be harrowing for any American to read.

Well, any that aren't themselves in the grip of the same affliction.

the overthrow of Allende (I wasn't even born), but I do remember watching Death and the Maiden (the film) when I was 16 and how I went to the library the next weekend and checked out the original play script. Watching the movie was one of several incidents from that summer that I now see as pivotal in leading my self-centered teenage ass down the path of liberalism. It also sparked an insatiable desire to play the Schubert- one of the finest string quartets ever composed. It took 6 years to get it done- and I even though I've probably listened to it hundreds of times (and played it dozens) I still think of Paulina when I hear it.

Do you know when the coup in Chile happened? September 11, 1973.

Thank you Ariel Dorfman. There was a lot I did not know and still can learn. I have now read your article several times I hope to see your movie, "Promise to the Dead" if it comes to Vancouver Island.

Your encounter with the woman grieving for Pinochet is moving. Did you do the right thing? Yes.

You were moved by her genuine grief and misery over the imminent death of a man, Pinochet, who was your enemy. You responded to the commonality of being human when you witnessed and felt her sorrow as if it were your sorrow.. Who knows what the woman thought after your compassionate encounter into her wailing for the life of her hero? Thank you for sharing that moment.

Standing on the same balcony that Allende stood on...realizing that he is gone ...the crowds which stood beneath him at the balcony are gone...we all go, as the administrator of that memorial park told you -- "we all end up anyway"...yet it is the compassion we share and the tests we survive that mark our trail as we go forward from this stage into the vast eternal which some call the Paradise journey.

I have shared the story of Paulina's integrity with my friends.